Today President Obama is speaking about clean energy and energy efficiency at a Walmart in Mountain View, Calif. Of all the places he might give a big speech on energy, a Walmart supercenter is a baffling and disconcerting choice.

Walmart — despite its skill in attracting publicity like this — is a laggard on renewable energy and one of the biggest and fastest-growing climate polluters on the planet. While many competing retailers are already running on 100 percent renewable power, Walmart’s wind and solar projects supply just 3 percent of its U.S. electricity — and that’s down from 4 percent two years ago.

Walmart’s fossil fuel consumption and climate emissions, meanwhile, are growing rapidly. In the last year alone, Walmart’s climate emissions rose 2 percent, or more than 500,000 metric tonnes. It now ranks just behind Chevron on the list of biggest climate polluters.

As if these facts were not troubling enough, a recent academic study has documented, for the first time, how the big-box retailing revolution led by Walmart and other big chains has dramatically increased the amount of energy we’re using to schlep consumer goods across the country and into our homes. The data is downright shocking. The movement of retail goods consumes 440 percent more energy today than 40 years ago. By contrast, overall energy use in the U.S. has grown just 45 percent. Transporting stuff — shampoo, jeans, television sets — to stores and then to homes now accounts for almost 7 percent of all the energy Americans use. (And this figure doesn’t even count shipping goods from overseas — just domestic freight.)

These findings come from a study published in Environmental Science & Technology and authored by energy experts Laura Schewel of UC-Berkeley and Lee Schipper, formerly of Stanford (and now deceased). “The movement of retail goods is … a significant — but understudied — fraction of our overall energy footprint,” the authors write.

Why are we now burning so much more fossil fuel to move retail goods? There are multiple reasons, but many of the most important factors are rooted in the rise of Walmart. Aided by government subsidies and favorable zoning policies, the explosive growth of this chain and others like it has radically transformed retailing, changing both how goods are distributed and how people shop for them.

One of the biggest changes has been a sharp increase in the number of miles Americans drive for shopping. Growth in shopping-related driving has far outpaced increases in driving for all other purposes. “The retail industry has consolidated, going from about nine stores per thousand residents in 1970 to less than four per thousand residents in 2009,” the study explains. “This phenomenon … began with the rise of the department store and concluded with the widespread presence of Big Box retail.” Fewer stores per capita means most people have to drive a little further to get what they need. U.S. households now log an average of 2,200 miles more a year to shop than they did in 1969.

Another big change has to do with how much further our stuff is trucked within the U.S. The growth in “stuff miles” is likely a result of the fact that Walmart and other large chains have driven manufacturing overseas. “Imported goods arrive in the U.S. at ports, which may be further from their final destination than were the domestic production facilities of earlier decades,” the study notes.

Some 40 percent of the goods that arrive by ship in Southern California, where Walmart is by far the largest importer, are bound for stores east of the Rocky Mountains. Thanks to the deregulation of trucking and the just-in-time delivery model Walmart pioneered, most of these goods will be shipped by truck, rather than train, even though rail is far less energy-intensive.

Adding solar panels to some of its stores by no means makes up for all the ways Walmart, together with Target and other big chains, has made and is still making retailing far more polluting than it once was. Nor does it make Walmart’s planned expansion — it wants to build hundreds of new stores in the next year alone with the aim of squeezing out smaller competitors and growing its market share — anything but a very bad idea for the planet.

Alongside the good policies on solar power and energy efficiency that President Obama is announcing today, he should add a few more. We need to get rid of tax loopholes and hidden subsidies for Walmart, and stop allowing land to be consumed for sprawling retail development. Instead we need policies that support local economies and spur the regeneration of neighborhood businesses that source some of their goods regionally and enable residents to walk or bike for their daily errands.

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Correction: This post originally said Walmart’s greenhouse gas emissions rose by 500 million tonnes last year; in fact, it was 500,000 tonnes. We apologize for the mistake.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Politics]]>http://grist.org/climate-energy/walmart-is-the-last-place-obama-should-be-making-a-clean-energy-speech/feed/0walmartWalmart’s latest organic scheme is just part of its plot to take over our food systemhttp://grist.org/food/walmarts-latest-organic-scheme-is-just-part-of-its-plot-to-take-over-our-food-system/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/food/walmarts-latest-organic-scheme-is-just-part-of-its-plot-to-take-over-our-food-system/#commentsFri, 25 Apr 2014 12:04:28 +0000http://grist.org/?p=238757]]>

Walmart recently announced that it would stock a selection of lower-cost organic packaged foods. A storm of positive press followed, including two U.S. News columns (here and here) by David Brodwin of the American Sustainable Business Council, who argued that, despite Walmart’s many sins, it was doing good in this case by legitimatizing and mainstreaming sustainable products in the eyes of consumers, investors, the media, and other companies.

I’m a big fan of David’s work, and of ASBC, but I think he’s got this one backward. The story that Walmart created with its announcement was not: Wow, organics have changed. They’ve gone mainstream. (That’s not really news, after all.) Instead, the story was: Wow, Walmart has changed. It’s gone organic. In other words, Walmart is not legitimizing organic foods so much as using organic foods to legitimize its own business model.

To me, the pivotal question that ought to frame any discussion about Walmart’s role in our food system is: Will people and the planet be better off if Walmart grows to control 50 percent of the U.S. grocery market?

Growth, after all, is what this is ultimately about. In 2005, staring down bad headlines and organized opposition in one city after another, Walmart realized that it faced a hard ceiling on its expansion if it did not improve its public image, particularly in the liberal-leaning areas of the country. It launched its sustainability campaign that year, pledging to be a leader on climate change and shift completely to renewable power. Walmart has not made much progress on those ostensible goals. Indeed, its greenhouse emissions are higher than ever and it derives just 4 percent of its electricity from its wind and solar projects.

But Walmart has succeeded spectacularly in the real purpose of this project. The company is 37 percent bigger in the U.S. today than it was in 2005.

Walmart is once again struggling with its image, amid an unprecedented series of strikes and other actions by its workers, as well as new revelations about its impact on the economy. In response, Walmart is offering up many distractions, from commercials that evoke a time when America was a maker economy to shiny cans of organic tomato paste. But we should never take our eyes off what’s really at stake here. Walmart is a growth machine. It’s not interested in being a better company, only in being a bigger one.

As crazy as it is, we are well on our way to a future in which Walmart controls half of our food system. In 1998, Walmart accounted for 4 percent of grocery sales. A mere 16 years later, its market share has climbed north of 25 percent. Already Walmart captures more than 50 percent of food sales in 40 metro areas. It plans to open at least 385 new stores in the U.S. over the next year alone.

Even the Great A&P — such a juggernaut in its day that Congress passed new antitrust legislation to contain it — never had anywhere near the market power Walmart now has.

Walmart’s rise as a grocer has had the effect of making conventional food production more concentrated and industrialized than ever before — a trend it will surely bring to organics. In response to Walmart’s growing market power, food companies embarked on a wave of mergers in the hope that, by joining forces, they could become big enough to supply the retailer without getting crushed in the process. Today, four meatpackers slaughter 85 percent of the nation’s beef. One dairy processor handles 40 percent of our milk supply.

With fewer companies bidding for their output and Walmart demanding ever lower prices, nearly everyone involved in food production and distribution has seen their income take a hit. Farmers are getting a significantly smaller share of the consumer food dollar. Wages for slaughterhouse workers have fallen 9 percent in the last 15 years. Employees at competing grocery stores have lost ground on wages and given up benefits.

Indeed, no company has done quite as much in the last 20 years to undermine the broad middle class and expand poverty. Walmart has propelled poverty at the macro level of our economy as well as the micro: One peer-reviewed, published study found that when Walmart opens a store, poverty rates in the surrounding county rise.

Walmart is determined to take us further down this road, leading us along with a can of inexpensive industrial-organic carrots. But its continued expansion will undoubtedly come at the expense of a more diverse food system that could help us rebuild local economies and move families out of poverty.

It’s within our power to stop Walmart — to insist that its resources be directed at being a better company, not a bigger one. But we’ll need a unified front to do so.

Aside from Walmart itself, there is no louder and more enthusiastic cheerleader for the retail giant’s sustainability campaign than Environmental Defense Fund. A quick perusal of the news over the last few weeks finds EDF issuing a press release about Walmart’s green leadership, praising its environmental boldness in a Fortune interview, backing its solar claims in a Fast Company article, and headlining a live chat about Walmart hosted by The Guardian.

EDF, one of the nation’s largest and best-known environmental organizations, is Walmart’s right-hand man in the green game. It turns out, unlike most Walmart jobs, that’s a pretty lucrative gig to have.

Since 2005, EDF has received $66 million from the Walton Family Foundation. The Waltons are the children and grandchildren of Walmart founder Sam Walton. The crucial thing to know about the family — in addition to their mind-boggling wealth, estimated at $145 billion — is that they control Walmart. They not only have several seats on the company’s board, including the chair. They own over half of Walmart’s stock.

So, the Waltons both run Walmart and finance EDF. Their donations to EDF started in 2004, shortly before Walmart launched its sustainability campaign. For the Waltons, the donations are a bargain, giving Walmart’s environmental announcements an instant veneer of green credibility.

It’s a great deal for EDF, too. Over the last two years, Walton money has supplied about one-eighth of the organization’s roughly $100 million annual budget.

But to keep this back-door cash rolling in and preserve the PR value Walmart is buying, EDF has to make sure its financial connection to the company stays well out of view of journalists. In interviews and web posts, the organization not only fails to disclose the conflict of interest, but seems to go out of its way to mislead reporters and the public. When EDF staff blog about Walmart on environmental news sites, they note in their bios, “EDF does not accept payment or donations from Walmart or any of its other corporate partners.” When EDF President Fred Krupp named Walmart as the company he particularly admired in a Fortune magazine Q&A, a parenthetical note assured readers that EDF “does not accept payment or donations from Wal-Mart.”

Even The New York Times failed to catch EDF’s conflict of interest, running a story last year about the organization’s work with Walmart under the headline “Unexpected Ally Helps Wal-Mart Cut Waste.” The piece noted that EDF “does not accept contributions from Wal-Mart or other corporations it works with.” (The Times reporter quickly posted a correction when I brought the Walton Family Foundation grants to her attention.)

To his credit, Marc Gunther, editor-at-large of Guardian Sustainable Business US, confronted EDF Managing Director Elizabeth Sturcken on the issue last week during a live chat about Walmart. When she trotted out the organization’s standard deflection, he came back with a followup:

Elizabeth Sturcken: Unlike many non-profit organizations, EDF chooses not to take money from corporations or corporate-run philanthropies. This allows EDF to remain an independent and credible third party, keeping the best interest of the environment front and center. What’s really great is that there are so many individuals and family foundations that are passionate about the environment.

Marc Gunther: So Elizabeth, are you saying that EDF can remain independent — and criticize Walmart when necessary — despite the funding from the Walton foundation?

Elizabeth Sturcken: The Walton Family Foundation is an independent foundation, governed separately from Walmart. I don’t have readily available all the information on their funding.

But disclosing EDF’s financial connection to Walmart still remains a rarity in reporting on the company’s sustainability campaign. A recent Fast Company article touting Walmart’s impact on renewable power, for example, relied on just three sources: Walmart, a company contracting with Walmart, and EDF. Perhaps not surprisingly, the article is riddled with half-truths and one critical factual error. It says that Walmart’s greenhouse gas emissions have declined by 20 percent since 2005, when in fact they have risen by 14 percent, according to the company’s own disclosures. My emails to the reporter have so far gone unanswered.Fast Company is working on a correction.

This month, citizens and planning officials in Cape Cod, Mass., will get a chance to do what almost no one else in the U.S. is allowed to do when deciding whether to approve or reject a big-box retail development: weigh the likely impacts on the region’s economy.

Thousands of proposals to build big-box stores and shopping centers will be submitted to cities and towns this year. (Walmart alone is pushing to open 220 new stores by January.) In almost every case, local planning policies will limit any review of these projects to conventional zoning issues, like how much traffic the store will generate and whether the site has sufficient landscaping.

Questions about the economic impacts of these projects will be off the table. Residents who want to talk about how a new shopping center will affect the viability of Main Street business districts, wage rates for local workers, or even the cost of public services will be told that those issues cannot be considered as part of the planning board’s deliberations.

This narrow approach to land-use policy strips communities of an important tool for shaping their own economic future, constraining the reach of extractive corporations, and moving toward less carbon-intensive economic systems and shopping patterns.

One exception to this common state of affairs is Cape Cod, a peninsula home to about 217,000 people.

Mindful of the Cape’s fragile environment and economy (despite pockets of wealth, the peninsula’s per capita income is well below the state average), residents voted to create the Cape Cod Commission in 1990. Made up of representatives of each of the Cape’s 15 towns, this regional planning body has the authority to review, and reject, large development projects that could significantly impact the local economy or environment, including any commercial building over 10,000 square feet. The commission does not supplant municipal planning boards, but rather adds a second layer of review for large projects, in which all of the region’s towns are given a say.

Guided by a Regional Policy Plan that frowns on development outside of town centers and favors projects that protect the Cape’s character, expand local ownership, and enable the region’s communities to meet more of their own needs instead of relying on imports, the Cape Cod Commission has turned down several big-box stores over the last two decades, including a Walmart in Falmouth, a Sam’s Club in Hyannis, a Costco in Sandwich, and a Home Depot in Yarmouth.

A few big retailers have made it in, but only by proposing much smaller stores and locating them on sites that were already developed. Walmart finally won approval to open its one and only store on the peninsula when it applied to put a 73,000-square-foot store (one-third the size of a typical supercenter) into a building in Falmouth previously occupied by a defunct regional department store chain. Home Depot likewise was given the green light to take over an empty retail space in Hyannis, opening a store about half its standard size.

Now the Cape Cod Commission is reviewing a proposal to build a 128,000-square-foot Lowe’s in the town of South Dennis. In a filing [PDF] with the commission, Lowe’s said the store would create 115 new jobs. But an analysis [PDF] by FXM Associates found that Lowe’s would not be adding to the economy, but rather siphoning off 10 to 20 percent of the sales at dozens of local hardware, lumber, appliance, paint, plumbing, and other stores. Declining revenue would force these retailers to lay off 163 people.

These threatened jobs pay about 25 percent more on average than Lowe’s does, meaning the store’s arrival would trigger a net decline in household incomes of $3.2 million annually. The drain on the region’s economy is even greater, the analysis notes, if you consider the fact that, unlike competing locally owned retailers, Lowe’s will purchase very little in the way of goods and services from other Cape Cod businesses.

At two public hearings to be held by the commission this month (details here and here [PDFs]), citizens will get to weigh in on these issues, as well as the environmental impacts of a low-rise box store with five acres of parking.

Aside from Cape Cod, Vermont is the only other region with a system for considering the costs and benefits, both economic and environmental, of large projects. (Maine went down this road with the passage of the Informed Growth Act in 2007, but the state’s unpopular governor, Paul LePage, gutted the law soon after taking office in 2011.) A handful of cities now require economic impact studies for large-scale retail development, but one of the advantages of Cape Cod’s approach is that it’s regional, so developers can’t just threaten to move next door if one municipality says no.

Land-use policy is one of the most powerful — and underutilized — tools communities have for steering the evolution of their economies. With the global corporate economy rife with hidden costs and consequences, more communities would do well to take advantage of it.

Cities where small, locally owned businesses account for a relatively large share of the economy have stronger social networks, more engaged citizens, and better success solving problems, according to several recently published studies.

And in the face of climate change, those are just the sort of traits that communities most need if they are to survive massive storms, adapt to changing conditions, find new ways of living more lightly on the planet, and, most important, nurture a vigorous citizenship that can drive major changes in policy.

That there’s a connection between the ownership structure of our economy and the vitality of our democracy may sound a bit odd to modern ears. But this was an article of faith among 18th- and 19th-century Americans, who strictly limited the lifespan of corporations and enacted antitrust laws whose express aim was to protect democracy by maintaining an economy of small businesses.

It wasn’t until the 20th century that this tenet of American political thought was fully superseded by the consumer-focused, bigger-is-better ideology that now dominates our economic policy-making. Ironically, the shift happened just as social scientists were furnishing the first bona fide empirical evidence linking economic scale to civic engagement.

In 1946, Walter Goldschmidt, a USDA sociologist, produced a groundbreaking study comparing two farming towns in California that were almost identical in every respect but one: Dinuba’s economy was composed mainly of family farms, while Arvin’s was dominated by large agribusinesses. Goldschmidt found that Dinuba had a richer civic life, with twice the number of community organizations, twice the number of newspapers, and citizens who were much more engaged than those in Arvin. Not surprisingly, Dinuba also had far superior public infrastructure: In both quality and quantity, the town’s schools, parks, sidewalks, paved streets, and garbage services far surpassed those of Arvin.

At about the same time, two other sociologists, C. Wright Mills and Melville J. Ulmer, were undertaking a similar study of several pairs of manufacturing cities in the Midwest. Their research, conducted on behalf of a congressional committee, found that communities comprised primarily of small, locally owned businesses took much better care of themselves. They beat cities dominated by large, absentee-owned firms on more than 30 measures of well-being, including such things as literacy, acreage of public parks, extent of poverty, and the share of residents who belonged to civic organizations.

One might expect such findings to have had a powerful influence on government policy. In fact, Congress ignored Mills and Ulmer, while Goldschmidt’s study was actively suppressed by his bosses at the USDA, who, under the sway of big agribusiness, treated his research as though it were radioactive. They eventually fired Goldschmidt and abolished his entire department. In the following decades, a wide range of federal policies would work to facilitate and promote the concentration of capital and the rise of big industry.

Today, as we find ourselves struggling with a climate crisis that demands a far more active and creative democracy than we currently have, a new body of research is once again illustrating the civic advantages of decentralizing ownership and transitioning more of our economy to community-scaled enterprises.

“Residents of communities with highly concentrated economies tend to vote less and are less likely to keep up with local affairs, participate in associations, engage in reform efforts or participate in protest activities at the same levels as their counterparts in economically dispersed environments,” sociologists Troy Blanchard and Todd L. Matthews concluded in a 2006 study published in the journal Social Forces. In studies of both agricultural (2001) and manufacturing (2006) communities, the late Cornell sociologist Thomas Lyson also found that those places with a diversity of small-scale enterprises had higher levels of civic participation and better social outcomes than those controlled by a few outside corporations.

It’s not just that cities with more social capital are better able to foster local enterprises and resist corporate consolidation. The causality actually seems to go the other way: Where economic power is diffused, political power is more widely and democratically exercised. And, likewise, as economic power becomes more concentrated, civic engagement slumps. Sociologists Stephan Goetz and Anil Rupasingha, for example, have documented a decline in civic participation, including voter turnout and the number of active nonprofit organizations, after Walmart moves into a community. And, with each Walmart store that opens in a city, social capital further erodes, their 2006 study finds.

Still other research has drawn a link between a small-scale economy and improved community well-being, including lower rates of crime and better public health. A study published in 2011, for example, found: “Counties with a vibrant small-business sector have lower rates of mortality and a lower prevalence of obesity and diabetes.” The authors surmise that a high degree of local ownership improves a community’s “collective efficacy” — the capacity of its residents to act together for mutual benefit. Previous research has linked collective efficacy to population health, finding that engaged communities tend to create the kinds of infrastructure (think of farmers markets and bike lanes) that foster healthier choices.

What is it about a locally rooted economy that fosters social ties and civic engagement? There’s much to be said for the value of doing business with people who know us and whose success is intimately tied to the well-being of the community. Small businesses are not merely smaller versions of large businesses; they are running on a different operating system altogether. Goldman Sachs makes money regardless of whether foreclosures are going up or down. But a local bank only does well when its borrowers do well. Business decisions are thus guided by very different motivations. And, in times of crisis, economic resources that are controlled locally are much more readily marshaled and reconfigured to meet shifting local needs.

Independent businesses also create environments that foster interaction. Research suggests you are roughly seven times as likely to end up in a conversation with another customer at a farmers market or neighborhood bookstore than you are at a big-box store (not to mention the isolating experience of shopping on Amazon). To run one’s errands in places that encourage lingering and conversation, where economic exchange is embedded in human relationships, is to experience the place where you live in a meaningful way. No wonder this leads to more engaged and resilient communities.

Of all the environmental benefits that might flow from shifting to a more locally focused economy — from reducing global shipping to creating systems of production that are better matched to the limits and resources of particular ecosystems — perhaps the most significant would be a renewed capacity to act together for the common good and tackle the looming challenges before us.

Filed under: Cities, Climate & Energy, Living]]>http://grist.org/cities/locally-owned-businesses-can-help-communities-thrive-and-survive-climate-change/feed/0neighborhood-storessmall stores on Main StreetBangladesh fire shows why we can’t trust Walmart to green its supply chainhttp://grist.org/business-technology/bangladesh-fire-shows-why-we-cant-trust-walmart-to-green-its-supply-chain/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/business-technology/bangladesh-fire-shows-why-we-cant-trust-walmart-to-green-its-supply-chain/#commentsThu, 20 Dec 2012 12:21:50 +0000http://grist.org/?p=149406]]>Walmart has staked the lion’s share of its sustainability program on greening its supply chain. Instead of changing its own business practices — selling flimsy, landfill-bound products and building sprawling stores that can only be reached by car, for example — Walmart has said that it can make more headway on greenhouse gas emissions by pushing its suppliers around the world to reduce their energy and resource use.
The Tazreen factory where workers made clothes for Walmart until a tragic fire on Nov. 24.Reuters / Andrew Biraj

But in the aftermath of the horrific fire that took the lives of 112 workers at the Tazreen garment factory in Bangladesh, it has become clear that Walmart has no credibility with regard to its supply chain. Its actions in the months leading up to the fire, and its obfuscations in the weeks since, demonstrate that Walmart cannot be trusted to put principles above greed, even when it explicitly states that it will do so, nor even to tell the truth about which factories are producing its goods.

In the wake of the Nov. 24 fire, Walmart at first said that it could not confirm that it had ever sourced apparel from the Tazreen factory, even though a document on the website of the factory’s parent company showed that Walmart had audited the factory in May 2011 and had found “higher-risk violations.”

Two days later, when The Nationpublished photos of Walmart-branded clothing in the charred ruins of the factory, Walmart admitted that the factory produced goods for its shelves, but said that it had removed the facility from its approved factory list at some point prior to the fire. Walmart claimed that a rogue supplier had continued filling orders there in violation of the retailer’s ban.

If Walmart did indeed suspend the factory — it has not responded to journalists’ questions about exactly when and why it did so — then it appears the company failed to inform its suppliers of the decision. According to The New York Times, the Tazreen factory was running orders for at least two Walmart suppliers at the time of the fire and, as recently as mid-September, five Walmart suppliers were using the factory.

This fire danger is well known to big retail chains. In Walmart’s 2012 Global Responsibility Report — the same report it uses to extol its sustainability initiatives — Walmart devotes more than a dozen pages to its Ethical Sourcing program and even talks up its work to reduce fire risks in Bangladeshi factories. “We visited our supplier factories to understand which ones met the [fire safety] criteria, and then worked with our suppliers in Bangladesh to phase their production out of buildings identified as high risk for fire safety hazards,” the report states. “Walmart proactively works with other brands and retailers to increase awareness and implementation of best practices for fire safety prevention in Bangladesh.”

Its “proactive” work with other retailers included a meeting held in Bangladesh in April 2011, at which Walmart and a dozen other retailers discussed a contractually enforceable memorandum that would require them to pay suppliers enough to cover the cost of safety improvements. According to the Associated Press, the discussions seemed promising until Sridevi Kalavakolanu, a director of ethical sourcing at Walmart, spoke. “In most cases very extensive and costly modifications would need to be undertaken to some factories,” Kalavakolanu is quoted as saying in the meeting minutes. “It is not financially feasible … to make such investments.” Her statement “sucked the air out of the room,” the AP reported, and “set the tone for the rest of the meeting, which ended the next day without a single company agreeing to the plan.”

(Kalavakolanu has given presentations about Walmart’s sustainability initiatives. She has also blogged on Walmart’s Green Room website about the company’s efforts to empower the women who work in Bangladeshi garment factories.)

The Worker Rights Consortium has estimated that it would cost up to $3 billion over the next five years to upgrade Bangladeshi factories. That would add about 3 percent to what Walmart and other companies now pay for apparel. Since production costs are only a small fraction of the final price of a T-shirt or a jacket, the cost to consumers would be pennies per garment.

If Walmart will not pay 3 percent more for basic fire safety, if it readily abandons factories when cheaper production can be had elsewhere, if it declines even to come clean about where its goods are made, then how can we buy Walmart’s claim that it is initiating an environmental revolution all along its supply chain, one that will transform factories across Asia into models of sustainability?

There is no accountability. Walmart can give reporters tours of select Chinese factories with impressive energy-efficiency gains, while much of its production continues to happen in the shadows. It can enlist support from mainstream environmental groups and publish lengthy annual reports that offer heartwarming tales of reducing pollution and improving the lives of production workers, all the while rapidly expanding a fundamentally destructive business model.

One of the greatest advantages of a global supply chain for corporations like Walmart is that it opens a vast distance between consumers and producers, rendering the injustices involved in making a garment or a television set virtually invisible to the end buyer.

The only true path out is to close that distance — to ensure that those who consume the products are also those who feel the impact of how they are made. That means bringing much of our manufacturing back home, where we can collectively weigh the costs and benefits of going cheap on safety and pollution controls. It means building an economy rooted in local and regional relationships among consumers and businesses, where real accountability is possible. It also means a radical revamping of global trade rules to ensure that the goods we do import reflect our values and the profits from our consumption are not siphoned off by corporations but actually benefit those who make the stuff we buy.

In short, achieving Walmart’s stated goal of an “environmentally and socially responsible supply chain” entails phasing out Walmart itself and bringing an end to its inherently unaccountable and unsustainable system of production and distribution.

A few weeks ago, The New York Times ran a story on the front page of the business section under the headline “Unexpected Ally Helps Walmart Cut Waste.” The retailer’s accomplice, readers of the article learned, is the Environmental Defense Fund, one of the largest and most influential environmental groups in the country. EDF has been working closely with Walmart on its sustainability efforts since 2005, and has even opened an office in Bentonville, Ark., where Walmart is headquartered.

The Times noted that EDF “does not accept contributions from Walmart or other corporations it works with.” EDF itself often mentions this when the subject of Walmart comes up, making note of it on its website, as well as in blog posts and other communications about its work with the company.

But, while it’s true that Walmart does not fund EDF (either directly or through its internal, company-run foundation), the environmental group does receive an awful lot of money from the Walton Family Foundation. Since 2004, the foundation has given EDF more than $53 million. Last year, the foundation’s $13.7 million grant to the group amounted to about 15 percent of EDF’s budget. After readers brought this to the attention of The Times, the newspaper amended its story and ran a correction noting the Walton foundation’s grants to EDF.

Established by Walmart founder Sam Walton in 1987 and run today by his children and grandchildren, the Walton Family Foundation has quietly grown into one of the largest foundations in the country. Last year, it ranked second in the nation based on total giving, behind only the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

It’s impossible to untangle all the connections between the Walton Family Foundation and the Walmart corporation. They are separate entities, but the Waltons pull the strings within both — the family has complete control over the foundation and significant control over the corporation.

The foundation’s board is made up entirely of Waltons. Walmart’s board includes three family members: Rob Walton, who’s been a director since 1978 and chair since his father Sam died 20 years ago; Jim, another of Sam’s sons; and Greg Penner, who is married to Rob Walton’s daughter, Carrie, one of the more visible and active directors of the foundation.

More important than board seats is stock: The Waltons own about 50 percent of Walmart’s stock. Yes, it’s mind-boggling, but a single family owns half of the second-largest company on the planet, a corporation whose revenues last year exceeded the GDP of all but 23 countries.

This year alone, the Waltons will pocket more than $2.7 billion in dividends from their Walmart stock. That’s more than the combined income of 53,000 American households earning the median income. The Waltons’ wealth and their capacity to fund their foundation rests not on a residual fortune amassed generations ago, but rather on a fat pipeline of profits flowing directly from Walmart’s current success.

The overlapping interests of the Walton foundation and the Walmart corporation are particularly evident in the realm of the environment. Walmart launched its sustainability campaign in 2005. About the same time, the Walton Family Foundation began ramping up its giving to environmental causes. The environment is now one of three major funding areas for the foundation.

Last year, the foundation made $71 million in grants to environmental organizations — with the largest grants going to groups that have collaborated with Walmart. In addition to EDF, top recipients included Conservation International, which has a corporate partnership with Walmart, and the Marine Stewardship Council, which began receiving foundation support the same year it agreed to certify and provide an eco-label for some of the seafood Walmart sells. These three organizations accounted for 46 percent of the foundation’s environmental funding last year.

Jon Coifman, spokesperson for EDF’s Corporate Partnerships Program, says that, while the organization has an ironclad policy of not accepting donations from the corporations it works with, EDF has always been less restrictive with respect to individual donors and family foundations because “it would simply be prohibitive to attempt to vet every stock portfolio or source of income.” Coifman also says that EDF “holds Walmart to the same standards we would any other company.”

What does it mean for the environmental movement that the Walton Family Foundation is now one of the largest environmental grantmakers in the nation? For one thing, it means that Walmart’s money is exerting significant influence in setting the agenda, defining the problems, and elevating certain kinds of approaches — notably those that reinforce, rather than challenge, the power of large corporations in our economy and society. That’s a worrisome trend given how far this company’s tentacles already reach into our economy and government.

Filed under: Business & Technology]]>http://grist.org/business-technology/walmart-heirs-quietly-fund-walmarts-environmental-allies/feed/0walton-logothe-waltons-2walton-logoThe Walmart de Mexico scandal: Here’s a punishment that befits the crimehttp://grist.org/business-technology/the-walmart-de-mexico-scandal-heres-a-punishment-that-befits-the-crime/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/business-technology/the-walmart-de-mexico-scandal-heres-a-punishment-that-befits-the-crime/#commentsFri, 27 Apr 2012 11:10:05 +0000http://grist.org/?p=95263]]>One of the more than 2,000 Walmarts in Mexico. (Photo by Christopher Porter)

Walmart spent much of last week burnishing its green image and touting its progress “toward becoming a more sustainable, responsible company.” All the while, those at the very top of the company, including CEO Mike Duke, knew that The New York Times was about to publish an explosive story that would lay to waste the notion that Walmart cares about anything other than its own growth.

The Times story presents credible evidence that Walmart’s Mexican subsidiary spent millions of dollars bribing local officials in order to speed up permits for new stores, get “zoning maps changed,” and make “environmental objections vanish.” When top executives, including Duke, learned of the bribes in 2005, they declined to notify U.S. and Mexican law enforcement, shut down Walmart’s own internal investigation, and continued to lavish promotions on the alleged ringleader, Eduardo Castro-Wright, who currently serves as Walmart’s vice chair.

In the days since the Times story broke, attention has turned to the potential punishment Walmart might face. A criminal investigation is underway at the U.S. Department of Justice, which, under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, could pursue prosecutions that might lead to substantial fines and even jail time for Duke and others implicated. The Mexican government, meanwhile, has initiated its own inquiry.

If justice is to be served in this case, though, Walmart must not only face fines and prison terms, but also be forced to sell off a sizeable number of its ill-gotten Mexican stores. By bribing officials, Walmart was able to crush its competitors, opening new stores so fast they had no time to react. In just a few years, Walmart came out of nowhere to dominate the Mexican economy.

But, as any athlete or other competitor knows, if you’re caught cheating your way to a win, then you most certainly do not get to keep the prize.

Walmart’s expansion into Mexico began in earnest in 1997 when it bought a controlling stake in one of the country’s largest retail chains. Walmart then began to build new stores with stunning speed. By the time the bribery allegations reached executives at the company’s Arkansas headquarters in the fall of 2005, Walmart had more than 750 stores in Mexico and was opening new ones at the rate of almost two per week.

Although Walmart’s expansion plans often encountered strong grassroots opposition, as its stores frequently do in the U.S., the company consistently outmaneuvered local residents, in part, we now know, by using bribes to skirt land-use rules and quickly win approvals.

In its no-holds-barred quest to dominate the Mexican landscape and economy, Walmart may have also violated Mexico’s antitrust laws. In 2002, the Federal Competition Commission opened an investigation into Walmart for using its market power to threaten farmers and other suppliers and pressure them into providing deep discounts that were not available to competing retailers, even at the same volume.

A year later, government officials said they found evidence that Walmart was violating competition laws, but not enough to pursue legal action. They closed the investigation on the condition that Walmart abide by a “code of conduct” in its dealings with suppliers.

Throughout all of this, Walmart portrayed its Mexican operations to both stockholders and employees as the crowning jewel of its international division. In its 2006 Annual Report, released shortly after top executives decided to look the other way on the bribery charges, according to the timeline in the Times story, Walmart crowed about its success south of the border: “Wal-Mart de Mexico had a great year as operating income grew faster than its sales increase of 13.7% (inflation adjusted).”

For employees in foreign subsidiaries that were struggling to meet their expansion targets, the message was clear: Be more like Walmart de Mexico.

As all of this was occurring, Walmart was also launching its sustainability campaign, a broad effort to remake the company’s image in order to keep its growth machine going, both here and abroad.

And grow it has. By 2009, Walmart was opening stores at the rate of more than three per week in Mexico. The pace accelerated to more than five stores per week in 2010. Last year, Walmart opened a staggering 358 stores in Mexico — compared to only 59 stores opened by the next five largest retail chains in the country.

Walmart now has more than 2,000 stores in Mexico, a country with one-third the population and less than one-tenth the retail sales of the United States. Walmart is Mexico’s largest private employer and largest retailer by a wide margin, capturing an estimated 62 percent of sales made at publicly traded supermarket chains, according to HSBC.

The only just resolution to all of this — the only punishment that would actually sting Walmart and provide real benefit to the public whose laws were broken — would be to force Walmart to divest a sizable share of its Mexican stores. These outlets could be sold, under supervision by competition authorities, to a range of competitors, including independent entrepreneurs as well as other chains. This would begin to restore a more competitive retail economy, one not dominated by a single cheating giant.

It’s a super long shot, I know, especially given the tepid response from the Mexican government so far. But citizens and activists groups on both sides of the border should be calling for something more than Mike Duke’s resignation. Walmart’s penalty should fit the scale of its crime and offer a measure of restitution for the communities and local economies harmed.

This post concludes the “Walmart’s Greenwash” series. To check out the rest of the series, follow the links at right, or start with the introduction.

Walmart’s sustainability campaign is not your typical corporate greenwash. It is more complex and clever than that. It has enough substance mixed in with the spin to draw you in. It’s easy to get swept up in the big numbers Walmart can roll out — like the 30 tons of plastic hangers it recycles every month — and to be charmed by the very fact of this giant company, with its hard-nosed corporate culture, using a word like “sustainability.”

More than a few environmentalists have been won over. With their endorsements and the flood of positive press that seems to follow each of Walmart’s green announcements, the company has managed to turn around flagging poll numbers, shift its labor practices out of the limelight, and, most crucially, crank up its expansion machine.

The environmental consequences of Walmart’s ongoing growth far outweigh the modest reductions in resource use that the company has made. Walmart’s business model and its future success depend on further accelerating the cycle of consumption, industrializing our food supply, and exacerbating sprawl. It’s not just Walmart, but also Target, Home Depot, and other big chains. The big-box model is “efficient” only to the degree that many of its costs are borne by the planet and the public at large. As these retailers take over an ever-larger share of the economy, more sustainable enterprises and systems of production and distribution are squeezed out.

Walmart’s expansion is not inevitable. The rise of Big Retail, much like Big Ag, has been aided and abetted by government policies and a host of hidden and not-so-hidden subsidies (which I detail in my book Big-Box Swindle).

Lately, though, instead of advocating for new and better policies, mainstream environmental groups having been abetting Walmart’s growth and helping to secure its future supremacy. It’s time to drop that failing strategy.

In writing this series, I didn’t set out to do the kind of he-said-she-said journalism that gives both sides equal space — especially because the media’s coverage so far has closely followed Walmart’s narrative. I did, however, ask Brooke Buchanan, Walmart’s director of sustainability communications, to respond to the main points raised in the series. She declined.

To bring the series to a close, I’d like to offer a few thoughts on how we might more effectively respond to Walmart’s sustainability campaign.

1. Push the media to hold Walmart accountable

It’s usually rewarding for journalists and researchers to uncover things that haven’t been reported elsewhere, but it happened so often while I was writing this series that I actually found it more troubling than exciting. Despite the extensive media coverage of Walmart’s sustainability campaign, key facts have gone unreported and crucial issues unexplored. The media have not reported on the miniscule progress Walmart has made toward its oft-repeated goal of being supplied by 100 percent renewable power, for example. Nor have any reporters detailed how, even as Walmart was winning kudos for a public statement in support of government action on climate change, it was funneling millions in campaign cash to lawmakers who would ensure such legislation never became law.

Journalists ought to be digging into issues like this. Given the state of newsroom budgets, however, that’s not likely to happen without an assist from the environmental community. There’s much that environmental bloggers could do to improve the overall balance of coverage and introduce more critical analysis.

A bigger responsibility lies with mainstream environmental organizations. So far, no group has taken up the task of evaluating what Walmart is and isn’t doing compared to what it should be doing, or providing some benchmarks to define what constitutes sustainability in retailing. Without this, journalists will keep taking their cues from Walmart’s press releases and the company will continue to reap a public-relations jackpot without any real public accountability.

2. Focus on the right question

Even many environmentalists who support Walmart admit that the company is fundamentally unsustainable. But they frame the debate in terms of a pragmatic acceptance of Walmart’s existence. They ask, Isn’t it better that Walmart make some improvements than not?

That’s the wrong question. Here’s the right one: Is allowing Walmart to take over an even larger share of our economy good for the planet? Because by cheering on Walmart’s modest sustainability efforts, environmentalists are paving the way for the corporation’s future growth. Over the last seven years, since launching its environmental initiative, Walmart has expanded its U.S. operations by one-third. It’s now making new inroads in East and West Coast cities, where it sees opportunities to add hundreds of supercenters and push its national grocery market share from one-quarter to one-third or more. Meanwhile, the company’s greenhouse-gas emissions are increasing, not shrinking. Worse, Walmart’s expansion is driving more sustainable enterprises out of business and precluding the development of others, just as a flurry of new enterprises — locally owned stores, small-scale food producers, farmers markets — are coming online and trying to chart a very different way forward. Environmentalists need to take sides in this fight.

3. Recognize Walmart’s economic power as a threat to the environment

Part of the reason Walmart adopted sustainability was that it presented a unique opportunity to transform something that had long been a source of public unease and criticism — the company’s size and market power — into a positive. As former CEO Lee Scott said when he unveiled the initiative in 2005, “What if the very things that many people criticize us for — our size and reach — became a trusted friend and ally to all?” Many environmentalists have been quick to adopt this view and expound on how much good a corporation as big as Walmart could do. Given the years of government inaction on pressing threats like climate change, it’s no wonder we long to have a powerhouse on our side.

Corporate social responsibility won’t get us very far, though. Companies will never forgo profits and make the hard choices needed to avert environmental disaster — unless they are forced to by public policy. But concentrated economic power impedes democratic action. This is partly because economic power invariably translates into political power. Walmart’s own political giving and that of groups it funds, like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, are big obstacles to environmental legislation.

Corporate consolidation has also eroded our independence and authority over our own lives. Few Americans can lay claim to any measure of economic autonomy today. We are increasingly powerless employees and passive consumers. Having acquiesced to an economy run by the likes of Goldman Sachs and Walmart, where “paper or plastic?” is about the most important decision we’re allowed to make, it’s perhaps no wonder that we have become less and less able to marshal the full power of our citizenship to tackle social and environmental issues.

4. Don’t lose sight of labor issues

As it has grown, Walmart has undercut key pillars of the middle class, notably small businesses and unionized jobs in manufacturing and grocery retailing. What it has given us in return are very low-paying jobs in its stores. Here’s a statistic that pretty well sums up the state of Walmart’s workforce: To make ends meet, the company’s 1.4 million U.S. employees each require an average of $943 a year in food stamps, Medicaid, and other public assistance. Most of the millions of other people around the globe employed directly or indirectly by Walmart are faring even worse.

It is a mistake for environmentalists to ignore their plight. Some of the reasons go to the very substance of sustainability. Poverty necessitates short-term decisions that are bad for the planet, and ultimately more expensive, like buying a $6 toaster whose lifespan is likely to be measured in weeks, not years. What’s more, devaluing human resources is part and parcel of the industrial machine. What commonly distinguishes sustainable from unsustainable enterprises is the importance placed on human skills and decision-making. It’s one of the main ways sustainable farming differs from industrial agriculture, for example.

Walmart is employing a divide-and-conquer strategy, and progressive activists should be smart enough not to fall for it. As Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association put it, “The biggest problem in the progressive movement today is a willingness to sell out others in the movement for the sake of pretending that your issue is the most important issue. Fair trade and fair wages for workers throughout the food chain is all of our problem.” Fair treatment of retail and manufacturing workers around the globe is too. If there’s one concept environmentalists should understand, it’s that everything is connected to everything else.

Aubretia Edick has worked at a Walmart store in upstate New York for 11 years, but she won’t buy fresh food there. Bagged salads, she claims, are often past their sell-by dates and, in the summer, fruit is sometimes kept on shelves until it rots. “They say, ‘We’ll take care of it,’ but they don’t. As a cashier, you hear a lot of people complain,” she said.

Edick blames the problems on the store’s chronic understaffing and Walmart’s lack of respect for the skilled labor needed to handle the nation’s food supply. At her store, a former maintenance person was made produce manager. He’s often diverted to other tasks. “If the toilets get backed up, they call him,” she said.

Tracie McMillan, who did a stint working in the produce section of a Walmart store while researching her forthcoming book, The American Way of Eating, reports much the same. “They put a 20-year-old from electronics in charge of the produce department. He didn’t know anything about food,” she said. “We had a leak in the cooler that didn’t get fixed for a month and all this moldy food was going out on the floor.” Walmart doesn’t accept the idea that “a supermarket takes any skill to run,” she said. “They treated the produce like any other kind of merchandise.”

That’s plenty to give a shopper pause, but it’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to reasons to be concerned about Walmart’s explosive expansion into the grocery sector.

Growth of a giant

In just a few short years, Walmart has become the most powerful force in our food system, more dominant than Monsanto, Kraft, or Tyson.

It was only 23 years ago that Walmart opened its first supercenter, a store with a full supermarket inside. By 1998, it was still a relatively modest player with 441 supercenters and about 6 percent of U.S. grocery sales. Last year, as its supercenter count climbed above 3,000, Walmart captured 25 percent of the $550 billion Americans spent on groceries.

As astonishing as Walmart’s national market share is, in many parts of the country the chain is even more dominant. In 29 metro markets, it accounts for more than 50 percent of grocery sales.

Seeking an even bigger piece of the pie, Walmart is campaigning to blanket New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and other big cities with its stores. It has made food the centerpiece of its public relations strategy. In a series of announcements over the last year, Walmart has deftly commandeered high-profile food issues, presenting itself as a solution to food deserts, a force for healthier eating, and a supporter of local farming.

It is a remarkably brazen tactic. On every one of these fronts, Walmart is very much part of the problem. Its expansion is making our food system more concentrated and industrialized than ever before. Its growth in cities will likely exacerbate poverty, the root cause of constrained choices and poor diet. And the more dominant Walmart becomes, the fewer opportunities there will be for farmers markets, food co-ops, neighborhood grocery stores, and a host of other enterprises that are beginning to fashion a better food system — one organized not to enrich corporate middlemen, but to the benefit of producers and eaters.

The big squeeze

Walmart’s rise as a grocer triggered two massive waves of industry consolidation in the late 1990s and early 2000s. One occurred among supermarkets, as regional titans like Kroger and Fred Meyer combined to form national chains that stood a better chance of surviving Walmart’s push into groceries. Today, the top five food retailers capture half of all grocery sales, double the share they held in 1997.

Go big or go out of business. (Photo by Walmart Stores.)

The second wave of consolidation came as meatpackers, dairy companies, and other food processors merged in an effort to be large enough to supply Walmart without getting crushed in the process. The takeover of IBP, the nation’s largest beef processor, by Tyson Fresh Meats is a prime example. “When Tyson bought IBP in 2001, they said they had to do that in order to supply Walmart. We saw horizontal integration in the meat business because of worries about access to the retail market,” explained Mary Hendrickson, a food systems expert at the University of Missouri. Four firms now slaughter more than 80 percent of cattle. A similar dynamic has played out in nearly every segment of food manufacturing.

“The consolidation of the last two decades has created a food chain that’s shaped like an hourglass,” noted Wenonah Hauter, executive director of Food & Water Watch, explaining that a handful of middlemen now stand between 2 million farmers and 300 million eaters.

Their tight grip on our food supply has, rather predictably, come at the expense of both ends of the hourglass. Grocery prices have been rising faster than inflation and, while there are multiple factors driving up consumer costs, some economic research points to concentration in both food manufacturing and retailing as a leading culprit.

Farmers, meanwhile, are getting paid less and less. Take pork, for example. Between 1990 and 2009, the farmers’ share of each dollar consumers spent on pork fell from 45 to 25 cents, according to the USDA Economic Research Service. Pork processors picked up some of the difference, but the bulk of the gains went to Walmart and other supermarket chains, which are now pocketing 61 cents of each pork dollar, up from 45 cents in 1990.

Another USDA analysis found that big retailers have used their market power to shortchange farmers who grow apples, lettuce, and other types of produce, paying them less than what they would get in a competitive market, while also charging consumers inflated prices. In this way, Walmart has actually helped drive overall food prices up.

What Walmart means when it says “local”

Last year, Walmart announced that it would double the share of local produce it sells, from 4.5 to 9 percent, over six years.

Come and get your Georgia peaches. (Photo by Walmart Stores.)

This doesn’t necessarily mean shoppers will soon find a variety of local produce at their nearest Walmart, however. Walmart counts fruits and vegetables as local if they come from within the same state. It can achieve much of its promise by buying more of each state’s major commodity crops, such as peaches in Georgia and apples in Washington, and by using big states like California, Texas, and Florida, where both supercenters and large-scale farming are prevalent, to pump up its national average.

“It speaks to the weakness that we’ve all known about, which is that ‘local’ is an inadequate descriptor of what we want,” said Andy Fisher, former executive director of the Community Food Security Coalition. “It’s not just geography; it’s scale and ownership and how you treat your workers. Walmart is doing industrial local.”

Walmart’s sourcing is becoming somewhat more regional, but the change has more to do with rising diesel prices than a shift in favor of small farms. It’s a sign that Walmart’s Achilles heel — the fossil-fuel intensity of its far-flung distribution system — might be catching up with it. According to The Wall Street Journal, trucking produce like jalapeños across the country from California or Mexico has become so expensive that the retailer is now seeking growers within 450 miles of its distribution centers.

“They see the writing on the wall. They know the cost of shipping from California back to Georgia and Mississippi is high now,” said Ben Burkett, a Mississippi farmer who noted that Walmart is now meeting with producers in his region. He’s hoping to sell the chain okra through a cooperative of 35 farmers. “We’ll see. My experience in the past with Walmart is they want to pay as little as possible.”

That skepticism is shared by Anthony Flaccavento, a Virginia farmer and sustainable food advocate. “If multimillion-dollar companies like Rubbermaid and Vlasic can be brought to their knees by the retail behemoth, how should we expect small farmers to fare?” he asks.

Local is the new organic — and Walmart does both the corporate, industrial way. (Photo by Walmart Stores.)

Walmart’s promise to increase local sourcing is reminiscent of its pledge five years ago to expand its organic food offerings. “They held true to their corporate model and tried to do organics the same way,” said Mark Kastel of the Cornucopia Institute. For its store-brand organic milk, for example, Walmart turned to Aurora Organic Dairy, which runs several giant industrial milking operations in Texas and Colorado, each with as many as 10,000 cows. In 2007, the USDA sanctioned Aurora for multiple violations of organic standards. Earlier this year, the agency stepped in again, this time revoking the organic certification for Promiseland Livestock, which had been supplying supposedly organically raised cows to Aurora.

These days, Walmart’s interest in organic food seems to have ebbed. “Our observation is that they sell fewer organic products and produce now than four years ago,” said Kastel. Ronnie Cummins of the Organic Consumers Association agrees. Today, he says, “the proportion of their sales that is organic is the lowest of any major supermarket chain.”

Walmart sees underserved neighborhoods as a way to edge its camel’s nose under the tent and then do what it’s done in the rest of the country: open dozens of stores situated to take market share from local grocers and unionized supermarkets. Stephen Colbert dubbed the strategy Walmart’s “Trojan cantaloupe.” For example, an analysis by Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s office estimates that if Walmart opens in Harlem, at least 30 supermarkets, green grocers, and bodegas selling fresh produce would close.

For neighborhoods that are truly underserved, it seems hard to argue with the notion that having a Walmart nearby is better than relying on 7-11 and McDonald’s for meals. But poor diet, limited access to fresh food, and diet-related health issues are a cluster of symptoms that all stem from a deeper problem that Walmart is likely to make worse: poverty. Poverty has a strong negative effect on diet quality, a 15-year study recently concluded, and access to a supermarket makes almost no difference.

Neighborhoods that gain Walmart stores end up with more poverty and food-stamp usage than communities where the retailer does not open, a study published in Social Science Quarterly found. This increase in poverty may owe to the fact that Walmart’s arrival leads to a net loss of jobs and lowers wages, according to research [PDF] by economists at the University of California-Irvine and Cornell.

Walmart has also been linked to rising obesity. “An additional supercenter per 100,000 residents increases … the obesity rate by 2.3 percentage points,” a recent study concluded. “These results imply that the proliferation of Walmart supercenters explains 10.5 percent of the rise in obesity since the late 1980s.”

The bottom line for poor families is that processed food is cheaper than fresh vegetables — and that’s especially true if you shop at Walmart. The retailer beats its competitors on prices for packaged foods, but not produce. An Iowa study found that Walmart charges less than competing grocery stores for cereals, canned vegetables, and meats, but has higher prices on most fresh vegetables and high-volume dairy foods, including milk.

Local? I don't think that word means what you think it means. (Photo by Walmart Stores.)

The future of food?

We stand to lose a lot if Walmart keeps tightening its grip on the grocery sector. Signs of a revitalized food system have been springing up all over — farmers markets, urban gardeners, neighborhood grocers, consumer co-ops, CSAs — but their growth may well be cut short if Walmart has its way.

“People need to keep an eye on the values that are at the root of what is driving so much of this activity around the food system,” said Kathy Mulvey, policy director for the Community Food Security Coalition.

Walmart is pushing us toward a future where food production is increasingly industrialized, farmers and workers are squeezed, and the promise of fresh produce is used to conceal an economic model that leaves neighborhoods more impoverished. Are we going to let it happen, or are we going to demand better food and a better world?

In 2006, Walmart made headlines when its vice president for corporate strategy and sustainability, Andrew Ruben, told a congressional committee that the company “would accept a well-designed mandatory cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gases.” Other major U.S. companies had spoken favorably of cap-and-trade, but Walmart made a bigger splash. Not only was it America’s second-largest corporation; it also had deep roots in the country’s coal-burning heartland.

But even as Ruben was delivering his testimony, Walmart’s political action committee (PAC) was funneling a river of campaign cash into the coffers of lawmakers who would ensure that the U.S. did absolutely nothing to curb its greenhouse gas emissions. During the 2007-2008 election cycle, 80 percent of Senate campaign contributions that came from Walmart’s PAC and large donors employed by the company went to senators who helped block the Lieberman-Warner cap-and-trade bill, according to data on political giving published by the Center for Responsive Politics. (When the bill arrived on the floor in 2008, it came up 12 votes shy of the 60 needed to overcome a filibuster.)

Over the last decade, Walmart has emerged as one of the country’s largest funders of political campaigns. Its dollars skew heavily in favor of candidates who routinely vote against the environment. Since the company launched its sustainability campaign in 2005, 40 percent of the $3.9 million it has given to members of Congress went to those who have lifetime scores of 20 or less on the League of Conservation Voters’ National Environmental Scorecard — meaning they vote against the environment 80-100 percent of the time. Another 19 percent went to those who vote against the environment 50-79 percent of the time.

Walmart’s largest donations have gone to some of the nation’s most powerful climate-change deniers. Since 2005, Walmart’s PAC has given $25,000 to House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio (“the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical”); $30,000 to Sen. Roy Blunt, R-Mo. (“there isn’t any real science to say we are altering the climate path of the earth”); and $29,500 to Sen. John Boozman, R-Ark. (“you can look back at some of the previous times when there was no industrialization, you had these different ages, ice ages, and things warming”).

Walmart gets political

Walmart wasn’t always a big political donor. Sam Walton, the company’s founder and leader until his death in 1992, didn’t believe in supporting campaigns. That view largely held through the 1990s, when Walmart’s donations at the federal level never exceeded $250,000 during an election cycle. Then, in the early 2000s, facing increasing opposition and a spate of state and federal bills that could affect its bottom line, Walmart decided it had to curry favor. It sharply increased both its political donations and its lobbying. Over the last five election cycles, Walmart has contributed over $8.5 million to federal candidates and political parties, making it one of the largest corporate donors in the country.

Between 2000 and 2006, Walmart gave nearly 80 percent of its federal contributions to Republicans, but by 2008, that figure had dropped to 55 percent. Still, the company pushed hard to defeat Barack Obama, as revealed in an embarrassing front-page Wall Street Journal story in August 2008.The article described how the company was holding mandatory meetings for store managers and department heads to make it clear that voting for Obama was tantamount to welcoming unions into Walmart.

The exposé came at a bad time. Walmart had launched a sophisticated PR operation to persuade liberals in the Northeast and West Coast, where its expansion plans had run into roadblocks, that it was a changed company and had come to embrace their green and community-minded values. Turning out the vote against their preferred presidential candidate did not fit the script.

Since then, Walmart has made even more of a point of giving to Democrats. The Washington Post has reported that the company now provides as much support to Democrats as Republicans. In the 2010 cycle, 53 percent of Walmart’s federal-level donations went to Democrats.

But a closer look reveals that Walmart’s giving is not so even-handed. In the Senate, Walmart has continued to favor Republicans, helping them turn the chamber into a major roadblock preventing federal action on climate change and other pressing issues. More than two-thirds of Walmart’s Senate donations in 2009-2010 went to Republicans.

In the House, more than half of Walmart’s contributions went to Democrats in 2009-2010, but the company favored those who tend to vote more like Republicans on environmental issues. Walmart made donations to 46 percent of all House Democrats in 2010, but it funded nearly 70 percent of those who voted against the cap-and-trade bill that passed the House in 2009. Conversely, Walmart supported only 18 percent of the 119 House Democrats who had a perfect score on the LCV’s 2010 scorecard.

Lopsided at the state level

Less noticed has been Walmart’s campaign funding at the state level, which remains sharply skewed. In 2009-2010, 77 percent of Walmart’s donations to state candidates and parties went to Republicans, according to the National Institute on Money in State Politics. Since 2003, the company has given a total of $9.9 million at the state level, with almost 80 percent flowing to Republicans.

Check out our whole series on Walmart's greenwashing.

Among the top 10 state-level recipients of Walmart’s cash during this period are three prominent climate-change-denying governors: Rick Perry (R-Texas), Mitch Daniels (R-Ind.), and Bob McDonnell (R-Va.). Also on the list are Pennsylvania’s Gov. Tom Corbett (R) and Lt. Gov. Jim Cawley (R), both of whom have been waging a veritable crusade on behalf of the natural-gas fracking industry.

One state attorney general also made Walmart’s top-10 list: Wisconsin’s J.B. Van Hollen. His biggest environmental claim to fame came shortly after he took office in 2007, when he unilaterally decided to withdraw Wisconsin from a multi-state lawsuit challenging a Bush administration directive that relaxed rules on coal-burning power plants.

Walmart talks big about sustainability, but doesn’t put its campaign money anywhere near where its mouth is. Whatever the company may say about the importance of legislative action on climate change or other environmental issues, its money is signaling the opposite, telling lawmakers that it’s perfectly fine to vote against environmental protection.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Climate Change, Politics]]>http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-12-07-walmart-spends-big-to-help-anti-environment-candidates/feed/0money_in_hand1.jpgMoney hand.Walmart button.Can you say ‘sprawl’? Walmart’s biggest climate impact goes ignoredhttp://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-29-can-you-say-sprawl-walmarts-biggest-climate-impact-goes-ignored/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-29-can-you-say-sprawl-walmarts-biggest-climate-impact-goes-ignored/#commentsWed, 30 Nov 2011 07:12:52 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-29-can-you-say-sprawl-walmarts-biggest-climate-impact-goes-ignored/]]>My, that’s a big abandoned parking lot you have.Photo: Rob StinnettEarlier this year, the New Jersey Sierra Club and the Pinelands Preservation Alliance tried but failed to block a permit for a new Walmart supercenter in the small coastal town of Toms River. The development, now moving forward, will destroy habitat for the threatened northern pine snake. What’s especially frustrating about the project, local environmentalists say, is that Walmart already has a store in Toms River. It’s just a mile down the road and will be shuttered when the new supercenter opens.

The Toms River site is one of several environmentally sensitive areas Walmart aims to pave over in the coming months. Many follow a similar pattern. In Copley, Ohio, Walmart wants to develop 40 acres of fields and wetlands, and then close another store a mile away. In Davie, Fla., the chain is seeking permission to destroy 17 acres of wetlands to build in a location that’s just a 15-minute drive from six other Walmart stores.

Even as Walmart has been hyping its supposed environmental epiphany, it has continued to unroll vast, low-rise supercenters at breakneck speed. Since launching its sustainability campaign in 2005, Walmart has expanded the amount of store space it operates in the U.S. by 32 percent. It’s added more than 1,100 new supercenters, almost all built on land that hadn’t been developed before Walmart showed up. The chain now has 698 million square feet of store space in the U.S., up from 530 million in 2005, plus another 287 million around the globe. Its U.S. stores and parking lots cover roughly 60,000 acres.

Walmart’s imprint on our landscape is “their most serious legacy for the environment,” according to Kaid Benfield, director of the Sustainable Communities and Smart Growth program at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “In terms of global warming, it’s a huge issue,” he notes. “Our per-person emissions are much higher in sprawl locations than they are in more walkable locations.”

Out with the old, in with the new.Photo: Brave New FilmsIn fact, it’s likely that Walmart’s land-use impacts indirectly contribute more CO2 to the atmosphere than all of its reported greenhouse gas emissions combined, including those from the electricity that powers its stores and the fuel that runs its trucks.

And, yet, land use is utterly absent from Walmart’s sustainability program. Its 2007 sustainability assessment briefly mentions “the unintended consequences associated with land development.” But annual sustainability reports since then have been silent on the issue. Words and phrases like sprawl, compact, mixed-use, pavement, impervious, runoff, auto-oriented, household driving, transit, and pedestrian do not appear anywhere in these reports.

Vacant Walmarts litter the landscape

Next year, Walmart plans to open at least 210 new stores in the U.S. A handful of these will be its new Express stores, which, at 10,000-15,000 square feet, are about the size of a Walgreen’s; they sell groceries and pharmacy items, and are designed to fit into dense urban areas without triggering a zoning review. But almost all of its new stores will be 185,000-square-foot supercenters built on virgin land at the edge of sprawling communities. Even in cities, Walmart still favors a big suburban-style store with a moat of parking. It only resorts to Express stores where necessity dictates. “They are not replacing the suburban model, but adding to it,” says Benfield.

Walmart’s development projects often encounter a host of local and state environmental regulations, but the retailer is remarkably adept at getting around them. In California, for example, Walmart has been using the initiative process to evade the requirements of the state’s Environmental Quality Act. As Will Evans recently reported on California Watch, by gathering signatures and submitting its development proposals as ballot initiatives, Walmart ensures they won’t be subject to the act. Under the initiative process, city governments must either approve the projects outright, with no conditions, or spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to hold a special election. Facing daunting budget problems, most cities just give in. Over the last two years, Walmart has used this technique to secure approval for at least seven new supercenters across the state.

The last thing the U.S. landscape needs is more retail space. At more than 40 square feet per capita, we now have twice as much retail space as we did in the early 1990s and nearly three times as much as Europe — and a shocking amount of it now sits empty. Even before the recession, Americans were unable to spend enough to support all of this development. The Denver metro area, which currently has at least 70 vacant big-box stores and a swelling supply of defunct malls, is typical of many American cities.

Abandoned Walmart for lease: Come and get it!Photo: Brave New FilmsWalmart’s commitment to “zero waste,” which has led it to recycle a growing share of waste at its stores, does not, unfortunately, extend to reusing cast-off retail space — not even its own. The company’s realty website lists 150 available Walmart stores, some less than a decade old and most located barely a stone’s throw from a new supercenter. Apparently, Walmart has found there’s more profit to be made by building shiny new stores than by updating and expanding existing ones.

Walmart has signaled that it plans to continue treating its buildings as disposable. Last year, when it negotiated with SolarCity to put solar panels on some of its California stores, Walmart insisted on 10-year power-purchase agreements, rather than the usual 20 years, because it would not commit to occupying these locations for more than a decade.

How Walmart’s sprawl drives climate change

New Walmart stores are made mostly of cement and steel, two materials with high levels of “embodied” carbon, meaning they require a lot of energy to manufacture. These emissions are not counted in Walmart’s annual tally of its contribution to climate change. Nor does the company count the impact of turning CO2-absorbing forests and fields into asphalt.

Far more significant, though, is how Walmart’s development patterns change our communities, reconfiguring their geography so that day-to-day errands require ever more driving. Between 1990 and 2009 — a period when Walmart grew from a regional chain to a national juggernaut — the number of miles the average American household logged each year for shopping grew by more than 42 percent, according to the National Household Travel Survey. By 2009, the average household was driving nearly 1,000 miles more to and from stores each year than it did in 1990.

Forgotten, but not gone.Photo: Mike SmailDriving in general increased during these years as more people moved to the suburbs, but shopping-related driving expanded six times faster than driving for all other purposes, including work, school, and recreation. Indeed, almost half of the total increase in driving in this period can be attributed to errands. It’s not that we’re taking more trips to the store. Households still report about 9 shopping trips each week on average. But each of those trips is about 2 miles longer. For the country as a whole, that’s an extra 149 billion miles on the road each year.

Not all of this extra driving can be attributed to the rise of Walmart and other big-box retailers, but a sizeable chunk of it can. There used to be many more small and medium-sized stores — independent grocers, pharmacies, hardware stores, and so on — dispersed across city neighborhoods and town centers. Most people only had to go a short distance to pick up something for dinner or buy a can of paint.

This more sustainable pattern, rooted in a time before most families had cars, began to fray with the advent of malls in the 1950s and ’60s. But it was the growth of retailers like Walmart, Home Depot, and Target that really decimated neighborhood businesses. While malls mainly sell clothing, the big boxes compete more directly with local stores catering to the day-to-day needs of a community. Today, retail is concentrated in a much smaller number of giant stores, each serving a larger geographic region than the many small stores it replaced. The inevitable result is that most households must drive a few miles more for most errands.

Walmart affects more than just shopping. Its arrival often shifts traffic patterns so dramatically that other businesses, and even institutions like churches and schools, are compelled to abandon older neighborhoods and move to the new center of activity, making every aspect of life more auto-dependent. “What they do on the landscape is hugely influential,” notes Kaid. “In many cases, [Walmart] went early to a location, not late. It’s partly a result of how much land they want to use. From their point of view, they couldn’t follow suburban development and still get that much land at a price that they wanted to pay. They go early and more sprawl comes in around them.”

Check out our whole series on Walmart's greenwashing.

The climate implications of all this are huge. To get a sense of the magnitude, say we attribute 10 percent of the increasein shopping-related driving since 1990 to Walmart. That’s probably conservative given how fast the company grew and the degree to which its stores have altered land use and traffic patterns, but 10 percent is Walmart’s current share of retail spending, so it’s a fair number to use. That would mean Walmart’s share of the extra miles driven is resulting in more than 5 million metric tons of CO2 emissions each year in the U.S. That’s almost a quarter of the company’s reported global CO2 emissions, which were at 21 million tons in 2009. Add in all of the other untallied climate effects of Walmart’s sprawl strategy and you can see how the company’s true carbon footprint balloons.

So, while Walmart claims to be taking a leadership role on climate change, it is refusing to address — or even acknowledge — one of the most significant ways its practices affect the earth’s atmosphere.

In 2009, Walmart created a stir when it announced that it would develop a Sustainability Index to assess the environmental impacts of every item on its shelves and provide an easy rating system to help shoppers make greener choices. CEO Mike Duke described [PDF] the index as “a simple tool that informs consumers about the sustainability of products” and helps them “consume in a more sustainable way.”This, in turn, would induce Walmart’s 100,000 suppliers to shrink their footprints.

The company set a five-year timetable. Many commentators gushed. The New York Times found the news so momentous that it dedicated an editorial to it, noting, “Given Wal-Mart’s huge purchasing power, if it is done right it could promote both much-needed transparency and more environmentally sensitive practices.”

More than two years on, this ambitious project doesn’t have much to show for itself. A consumer label “is really far off and maybe not a reality,” according to Elizabeth Sturcken, a managing director at Environmental Defense Fund, which has partnered with Walmart on its sustainability initiatives. “This information is really complex. Getting it reduced into a simple label for consumers is very challenging.”

Still, Sturcken thinks the project could produce valuable information for Walmart and manufacturers, and drive product improvements behind the scenes. “I think getting it into a system that product buyers and suppliers could use is much more attainable,” she said.

But even that seems to be proving elusive.

To do the necessary product analysis, Walmart founded the Sustainability Consortium, a university-hosted group. It has since attracted 75 corporate members, including Monsanto and McDonald’s, each of which must contribute at least $100,000 to the effort. To run the consortium, Walmart chose two academic institutions with which it has close ties: the Applied Sustainability Center, which is part of the University of Arkansas’ Sam M. Walton College of Business and was established in 2007 with a grant from the Walmart Foundation, and Arizona State University’s Global Institute of Sustainability, whose board of directors is co-chaired by Rob Walton, son of Walmart founder Sam Walton and chair of Walmart’s own board.

Barbara Kyle, director of the Electronics TakeBack Coalition, is skeptical that such an industry-dominated endeavor could produce a meaningful rating scheme. “You end up with manufacturers voting only for criteria that they already meet,” she said, adding that many critical issues, such as the durability of products and the impact of toxic inputs on factory workers, are excluded when corporations define sustainability. Kyle, who was on the task force that developed the EPEAT environmental rating system for computers, volunteered to take part in a Sustainability Consortium meeting on electronics last year, but was rebuffed. “They have all this stuff on their website about transparency and accountability, but they are anything but,” she said.

In the first year or two after its founding in July 2009, the Sustainability Consortium was close-lipped about its progress. In the last few months, the consortium has finally said that it is not in fact developing a rating system or even product-specific information. It is assembling general lifecycle data for types of products — a typical environmental footprint for orange juice or detergent, say, but not for specific brands within those categories. Spokesperson Jon Nicol says this data could be a starting point for a rating system should a company wish to develop one. So far, the consortium has finished just 10 assessments. A Walmart supercenter carries roughly 140,000 items across thousands of product types.

Was Walmart woefully naive about what it would take to create the kind of Sustainability Index it promised? Was it a miscalculation to have corporations play a big role in developing environmental standards for their own products? Should Walmart have put its efforts instead into refining and adapting an existing rating system, one not controlled by industry, such as GoodGuide? Was the index just a PR ploy from the start?

Raising questions about Walmart’s sustainability questionnaire

Although the Sustainability Index may never materialize, Walmart has been taking environmental issues to manufacturers in other ways. The company sent all of its suppliers a “sustainability assessment” [PDF] last year, asking them to answer 15 questions about their practices. But that survey has been criticized by some sustainable business experts. Joel Makower, a green business strategist, described the questions as “superficial at best, voluntary in nature, and the answers are largely yes-or-no, self-reported, and unverified.” Some suppliers privately grumbled that the survey was merely a tool for Walmart to better understand their cost structures and use that knowledge against them.

In China, where Walmart sources roughly 70 percent of everything it sells, the company has been undertaking other efforts. In 2008, Walmart organized a Sustainability Summit for its Chinese suppliers. Both outgoing CEO Lee Scott and incoming CEO Mike Duke gave speeches to the more than 1,000 attendees. Much of the coverage of the event framed it as Walmart getting tough with suppliers: You had better dramatically reduce the environmental impact of your factory or we’ll stop buying your goods.

What the company’s executives actually said was that Walmart had two main environmental goals [PDF] for its Chinese suppliers. The first: “we will require all our suppliers here to clearly demonstrate their compliance with Chinese environmental laws and regulations.” In other words, Walmart will no longer look the other way when its suppliers violate water-pollution and air-pollution laws. It’s good that Walmart is now on the side of the law, but then what are we to make of the company’s previous assertions over the years that its sourcing practices were ethical?

Check out our whole series on Walmart's greenwashing.

Walmart’s second stated objective was: “By 2012, our goal is for the top 200 factories we source from directly in China to achieve 20 percent greater energy efficiency.” There is plenty of low-hanging fruit when it comes to energy efficiency in China’s industrial sector and Walmart seems to be picking some of it. It has a clear financial incentive: Reducing energy use cuts costs, which presumably could result in Walmart paying suppliers less. Last December, the Environmental Defense Fund, which, at the time, was working in China to help Walmart achieve these reductions, reported that the company was on track to meet this goal by next year. Among the success stories that Walmart likes to highlight is the towel-maker Loftex, which has cut its electricity use by 25 percent and water use by 35 percent.

But the top 200 factories in China constitute less than 1 percent of the 30,000 factories in the country supplying Walmart, so a key question going forward is whether the others will follow in large numbers and in a way that can be verified. “[E]nergy efficiency in supplier factories still seems to be viewed as extracurricular by Walmart managers. It is not, in the lexicon of the Walmart world, seen as a ‘core activity,'” wrote Andrew Hutson, a project manager for corporate partnerships at EDF, in a blog post last December. Hutson said the program lacked mandates for supplier participation and a solid system for measuring progress. “For the program to be impactful and meet its potential, it needs to up its game. Dedicating sufficient resources to get the job done would be a good place to start,” he wrote.

So far, there’s no evidence that Walmart’s purchasing patterns have been changed at all by the answers it’s received to its questionnaire, by its energy-efficiency efforts with Chinese suppliers, or by the Sustainability Index program. Aside from a handful of examples like concentrated laundry detergent and CFL bulbs, it doesn’t appear that greener products are edging out more damaging ones on Walmart’s shelves. The company has not established incentives for its buyers to favor more environmentally friendly products; their performance continues to be measured on sales volume and profit margins. Walmart also refuses to make longer-term purchasing commitments to its suppliers, which leaves many wary of investing in new technologies that may take years to pay off.

While Walmart may have made sustainability part of its conversation with manufacturers, so far this has done little to alter business as usual.

Filed under: Business & Technology]]>http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-21-walmart-promised-green-product-rankings-fall-off-radar/feed/0organic-walmart-label-flickr-Walmart_stores-180x150.jpgIt looks like Walmart’s green-ratings plan has been shelved.Walmart button.Think Walmart uses 100% clean energy? Try 2%http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-17-walmarts-progress-on-renewables-has-been-very-slow/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-17-walmarts-progress-on-renewables-has-been-very-slow/#commentsFri, 18 Nov 2011 09:47:34 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-17-walmarts-progress-on-renewables-has-been-very-slow/]]>Walmart is moving like a tortoise toward its clean-energy goal.Context is critical to understanding Walmart’s sustainability initiatives and their impact on the retailer’s overall environmental footprint. But context has been sorely absent in the news media’s coverage of Walmart’s green efforts. Even within the environmental community, conversations about Walmart tend to miss the big picture.

Walmart’s renewable-energy activities provide a perfect example. Six years ago, the company announced that it was setting a goal of being “supplied by 100 percent renewable energy.” Succinct, powerfully stated goals are a signature of Walmart’s sustainability campaign — in part, it seems, because journalists often repeat these goals verbatim, so they function like stealth marketing slogans that infiltrate media coverage. Walmart’s renewable-energy goal has been especially effective on this front, appearing in thousands of newspaper articles and countless blog posts. Many of these stories use the goal as a jumping-off point to highlight the retailer’s renewable-energy projects, which include putting solar panels on 130 stores in California and buying 180 million kilowatt-hours of wind power in Texas annually. These stories create the overall impression that Walmart is making great progress on renewable energy.

But what if, rather than repeating Walmart’s stated goal of 100 percent renewable power, these news stories had instead reported that the company currently derives less than 2 percent of its electricity from its solar projects and wind-power purchases? That’s not a figure Walmart has published, and journalists have done little to bring it to light. At its current pace of converting to renewables, it would take Walmart about 300 years to get to 100 percent clean power. Some of its competitors are already there. Kohl’s and Whole Foods (both of which, I should add, have their own problems when it comes to the gap between their environmental PR and reality) have fully converted to renewable power, as have many independent retailers.

What’s holding Walmart up? It doesn’t want to spend the money.

“Because wind and solar power generally cost more than electricity from coal, nuclear or natural gas in most places, Walmart can’t or won’t buy clean energy on a scale that matters,” sustainable-business reporter Marc Gunther wrote earlier this year. Walmart, which reported operating profits of $25.5 billion last year, said as much in its latest sustainability report: “it has sometimes been difficult to find and develop low-carbon technologies that meet our ROI [return-on-investment] requirements.”

This a very different picture from the one the media have presented so far, which has portrayed Walmart as taking a leadership role on renewable power.

Another step back adds even more context: While the company has been talking big about renewable energy, its greenhouse gas emissions have been rising steadily. Between 2005 and 2009, Walmart’s reported emissions in the U.S. grew by roughly 7 percent. In Asia, they doubled. The company says its operations produced 21 million metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2009, and it expects 30 million metric tons of cumulative growth in emissions by 2015.

Neither Walmart’s renewable-energy projects nor its efficiency efforts are operating at a scale even remotely in league with the company’s size and growth trajectory. In the U.S., Walmart’s energy-efficiency steps have reduced energy use in stores built before 2006 by 10 percent, on average, saving about 1.5 million metric tons of CO2 annually. But new stores built in the U.S. since 2006 have added at least 3.5 million metric tons to Walmart’s yearly CO2 output.

The big payback

Check out our whole series on Walmart's greenwashing.

Commentators often note that cutting use of fuel and electricity saves Walmart money. But this is small change compared to the real payoff: a greener image and an enormous amount of positive publicity. This PR boost has enabled Walmart to accelerate the pace of its expansion. Six years ago, even the retailer’s own customers were starting to avoid its stores, while its development plans in cities like New York and Washington faced an impenetrable wall of opposition. Today, public opinion has shifted. Walmart’s store proposals, especially in the environmentally conscious Northeast and West Coast, are moving forward with less friction than before.

With fewer obstacles in its way, Walmart is anticipating big growth over the next couple of years. In the fiscal year that will end on Jan. 31, 2012, Walmart expects to have added between 36 and 39 million square feet of store space worldwide, and over the next year, between 45 and 49 million more — altogether, the equivalent of up to 470 average-sized supercenters. It also expects, next year, to grow sales by 5 to 7 percent, or $21 to $29 billion.

The company’s growth and sales goals always have specific time frames attached, of course, while its renewable-energy goal remains as undefined as ever. So as Walmart expands, thanks in part to goodwill generated by its green campaign, its environmental footprint will keep expanding right along with it.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Climate Change, Energy Efficiency, Renewable Energy, Solar Power, Wind Power]]>http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-17-walmarts-progress-on-renewables-has-been-very-slow/feed/0180x150_walmart_turtle.jpgturtle with walmart logoWalmart button.Is your stuff falling apart? Thank Walmarthttp://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/#commentsFri, 11 Nov 2011 14:45:55 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/]]>Forever in blue jeans, babe? Not anymore.Photo: bburkyMy friend Tony’s closet is as good a place as any to begin an investigation of Walmart’s environmental impact. Tony has a pair of Levi’s that date back to high school more than 20 years ago. They still fit him and they’re still in rotation. The fabric has a smooth patina that hints at its age, but, compared to another pair of Levi’s he bought only a couple of years ago, this pair actually looks far less worn. The denim is sturdier, the seams more substantial, the rivets bigger.

Tony’s old pair of Levi’s may well have been made in the U.S, and they likely cost more than his new pair. The new ones were manufactured abroad — Levi’s closed its last U.S. factory in 2003 — and, though Tony didn’t buy them at Walmart, their shoddy construction can be blamed at least in part on the giant retailer and the way it’s reshaping manufacturing around the world.

Since 1994, the consumer price of apparel, in real terms, has fallen by 39 percent. “It is now possible to buy clothing, long a high-priced and valuable commodity, by the pound, for prices comparable to cheap agricultural products,” notes Juliet Schor. Cheapness — and the decline in durability that has accompanied it — has triggered an astonishing increase in the amount of clothing we buy. In the mid-1990s, the average American bought 28 items of clothing a year. Today, we buy 59 items. We also throw away an average of 83 pounds of textiles per person, mostly discarded apparel, each year. That’s four times as much as we did in 1980, according to an EPA analysis of municipal waste streams [PDF].

Most consumer products have followed a similar trajectory over the last two decades. Walmart has done more than any other company to drive these changes, though other retailers have since followed its model. Where once we measured value when we shopped, Walmart trained us to see only price. Its hard bargaining pushed manufacturers offshore and drove them, year after year, to cut more corners and make shoddier products. As union-wage production jobs and family-owned businesses fell by the wayside, many Americans could no longer afford anything but Walmart’s cheap offerings.

Today Walmart says it wants to reduce the amount of pollution involved in making some of the stuff it sells. That seems like a good thing — except that everything else Walmart does is designed to undermine the durability of consumer goods, accelerate the flow of products from factory to landfill, and get us to buy more stuff. Even if Walmart does succeed in reducing the resources used to make a T-shirt or a television set, those gains will be more than outstripped by growth in the number of T-shirts and TVs we’re consuming.

The six-dollar toaster

On a recent visit to Walmart store No. 2659, just outside of Portland, Maine, I tried to find evidence of a shift to more sustainable products, but I didn’t see much beyond CFL bulbs and reusable shopping bags. There were no Seventh Generation cleaning supplies or organic cotton clothes, for example.

I did, however, spot a toaster that retails for $6.24 — a price that renders its longevity virtually irrelevant. If it breaks, just buy another.

Prices on general household goods have fallen by about one-third since the mid-1990s. Given how awash in stuff we were in those boom years, it’s shocking just how much more we buy now. Since 1995, the number of toasters and other small electro-thermal appliances sold in the U.S. each year increased from 188 million to 279 million. The average household now buys a new TV every 2.5 years, up from every 3.4 years in the early 1990s. We buy more than 2 billion bath towels a year, up from 1.4 billion in 1994. And on and on.

While there are certainly factors beyond Walmart that have contributed to this ever-expanding avalanche of consumption, the company has been a major driver of the trend. Its growth and profitability rest on fueling an ever-faster churn of products, from factory to shelf to house to landfill.

In a paper [PDF] that came out last year, three business professors illustrate how inducing manufacturers to cut product quality enhances Walmart’s competitive position. “Because lower quality products are usually cheaper to produce, it is often argued that discount retailers induce lower quality in order to drive down prices. Our model suggests, however, that the competitive and bargaining position effects provide incentives to induce lower quality regardless of changes in production costs,” the authors write.

They don’t make ‘em like they used to. Photo: Camilla CarlströmIn other words, getting manufacturers to make shoddier products doesn’t just mean that Walmart can offer super-cheap wares; it also helps Walmart marginalize its competitors and gain more dominance over its suppliers. By using its market power to drive down the quality of manufacturing, Walmart gains an advantage over department stores and independent retailers because quality (and the knowledgeable service that typically goes with it) is no longer an important factor in a consumer’s choice about where to shop. If you are going to end up with a crappy to mediocre blender anyway, then why bother spending more or availing yourself of the advice and service of a specialty retailer? Reducing the overall quality of products thus destroys a key competitive advantage of Walmart’s smaller rivals.

Even when a manufacturer responds to Walmart’s cost-cutting pressure by producing a separate, cheaper line to sell only in big-box stores — as many name-brand companies now do — the brand’s reputation for quality can suffer, making it hard for specialty retailers to persuade customers that the higher-quality, longer-lasting versions they offer are worth more.

As local stores and other competing retailers are weakened, manufacturers become more dependent on Walmart. Many major consumer products companies now rely on Walmart for one-quarter or more of their business. According to the study, this gives the chain greater bargaining power over its suppliers, who have fewer options for bringing their wares to market and thus little leverage to resist the retailer’s demands.

Walmart is also a master at getting shoppers to buy more than they came for. It employs all of the techniques that have been shown to spur “unplanned buying,” according to a recent study [PDF] in the Journal of Marketing. The study found that large stores that promote the concept of one-stop shopping and can only be reached by car generate the most impulse buys. Marketing messages that evoke abstract shopping goals are also highly effective at inducing people to put more stuff in their carts. The authors cite Walmart’s “Save Money, Live Better” slogan as a leading example.

According to the study, the least amount of unplanned buying occurs when a shopping trip involves multiple stores, each with a specific product focus, and the customer arrives on foot or by mass transit — in other words, when you shop at small neighborhood and downtown retailers.

A low-tar cigarette

Check out our whole series on Walmart's greenwashing.

Walmart has a powerful incentive to increase the scale of consumption. Sustainability will never be more than a modest sideshow to this larger endeavor. Nowhere in Walmart’s pronouncements about greening its supply chain does the company mention the durability of products or the pace at which households burn through the stuff its stores sell.

As consumers, we’re hardly innocent in all of this, of course. With prices falling below the real human and environmental costs of production, we have been happy to upgrade to a bigger TV or buy four T-shirts when one would suffice. But imagining that Walmart might be part of the cure is like putting tobacco companies in charge of ending smoking. Walmart’s sustainability plan is the low-tar cigarette of the environmental movement: it admits there’s a problem, but offers a kind of pseudo solution that’s really aimed at keeping us all puffing.

As Walmart takes over an ever-larger share of the global economy, companies that favor a more durable and sustainable model of production are squeezed to the margins. The business press is replete with tales of storied U.S. brands, like Levi’s, which held out against Walmart for years before finally giving in, moving overseas, and figuring out how to make a $10 pair of jeans. Some still resist. Stihl, for example, the world’s leading maker of chain saws, has been vocal about retaining the quality of its products by not selling to the big boxes. But if Walmart and those that follow its model continue to grow, there may soon come a day when no producer can escape its dictates.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Living]]>http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-11-is-your-stuff-falling-apart-thank-walmart/feed/0broken-beach-chair-flickr-camillac-180x150.jpgLevi's jeansbroken chairWalmart button.Walmart by the numbers: Green vs. growthhttp://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-07-walmart-by-the-numbers-green-vs-growth/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-07-walmart-by-the-numbers-green-vs-growth/#commentsTue, 08 Nov 2011 03:53:52 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-11-07-walmart-by-the-numbers-green-vs-growth/]]>Walmart’s six-year-old sustainability campaign has helped improve its public image, enabling the company to grow bigger and faster. That growth, ironically, has dramatically increased the retailer’s environmental footprint, and hurt local economies and the U.S. job market along the way.

2005 — year Walmart launched its sustainability campaign

38 — percentage of Americans who had an unfavorable view of Walmart in 20051

20 — percentage of Americans who had an unfavorable view of Walmart in 20102

12. Author’s calculation based on data reported in Walmart’s annual sustainability reports. A small percentage of the electricity delivered by utilities around the country is also from wind and solar, so Walmart does get some additional renewable power that way, as we all do.

Filed under: Business & Technology]]>http://grist.org/business-technology/2011-11-07-walmart-by-the-numbers-green-vs-growth/feed/0mixed-colored-numbers-180x150.jpgmixed colored numbersWalmart button.Why is Michelle Obama’s food initiative promoting Walmart?http://grist.org/food/2011-07-21-walmart-michelle-obama-and-the-future-of-food/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/food/2011-07-21-walmart-michelle-obama-and-the-future-of-food/#commentsThu, 21 Jul 2011 20:38:47 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2011-07-21-walmart-michelle-obama-and-the-future-of-food/]]>I winced yesterday when James Gavin, chair of the Partnership for a Healthier America, said he’d like to see Walmart double its U.S. store count. He was speaking at Michelle Obama’s event announcing that several retailers will open stores in “food deserts.” It was a sort of half-jokey remark, but, still, in a conversation about food in America, the suggestion that Walmart should have an even bigger role in our food system is pretty disturbing. This is a company that already captures 25 percent of grocery sales nationally and more than 50 percent in some metro areas.

It’s remarkable the way Walmart has managed to maneuver itself on this issue. If you were to rank the factors that have contributed to the disappearance of neighborhood grocery stores over the last two decades, Walmart would be a pretty formidable contender for the top spot. Today it is garnering heroic headlines for saying it will bring fresh food to places that lack it.

Those headlines could not be more valuable to Walmart right now. The chain has staked its U.S. growth strategy on expanding into big cities, like New York and Washington, where many people believe in ideas contrary to the company’s vision, like a middle class and living wages. Walmart sees underserved neighborhoods as potential points of entry, a way to edge around the opposition and get its camel’s nose under the tent.

Michelle Obama’s event did make some mention of independent grocers, but as an afterthought that had little impact on the Walmart-centric news stories that followed. After Gavin touted the promises of three big chains — Walmart, Walgreens, and Supervalu’s Save-A-Lot (how is it that no unionized supermarket chains were included?) — to open or remodel stores “in or near” underserved communities, he went on to mention commitments by three independent retailers.

Independent grocers should have been at the center of this announcement. After all, independent food retailers, including co-ops and farmers markets, have been instrumental in the success of the only program so far to make a real dent in the problem, the Pennsylvania Fresh Food Financing initiative. Of the 93 stores created or expanded by the initiative to date, almost all are independently or cooperatively owned.

Nevertheless, when the USDA published the government’s official map of food deserts earlier this year, it defined a food desert as a place that doesn’t have a major supermarket chain or a large grocery store (i.e., more than 50 employees and $2 million in sales). I guess that means my neighborhood greengrocer, which sells everything you need for a real meal and isn’t inflated by aisles of potato chips and soda, doesn’t count. It’s one of more than 1,400 small, independent food stores that have opened in the U.S. since 2002, one of the real bright spots on both the local food and Great Places fronts. Too bad Michelle Obama decided to pump up Walmart instead.

This is about more than food access, of course. It’s also about economics. These neighborhoods need more than poverty-wage jobs. They need ownership and the economic benefits that come with it. Studies estimate that only about 15 cents of every dollar spent at a Walmart store stays in the local community. That’s a big outflow of wealth for a poor neighborhood. Locally owned grocery stores return about three times as much on average to the neighborhood. That’s because they employ more local people (no corporate headquarters staff somewhere else) and they buy more services, like accounting and printing, from other neighborhood businesses.

Put another way, local businesses help to build a local economic ecosystem, where resources circulate and multiply. Walmart is a more of a colonizer, extracting wealth for its own benefit.

The farm economics are critical too. My neighborhood grocer has the flexibility to source from lots of local producers — not just farmers, but also a plethora of cheese-makers, hot-sauce producers, yogurt makers, and so on. Walmart’s centralized distribution system, run from Bentonville, Ark., is pretty easily gummed up if one of its stores carries any more than a couple of token local products.

Walmart’s dominance on the retail end of the supply chain has in fact led to more concentration, rather than diversification, of food production. Research has found that it’s spurred even more consolidation among processors, prompted bigger and more industrialized farming, and kept more of our food dollar for itself, reducing the share going to farmers.

Not allowing Walmart to expand any further would be one of the best things we could do for the future of food. Heaven help us if, riding in the White House limelight, it manages to double its store count and its market power.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Food, Living, Sustainable Food]]>http://grist.org/food/2011-07-21-walmart-michelle-obama-and-the-future-of-food/feed/0michelle-obama-flickr-lord-mariser-180x150-2.jpgGrassroots financing is underwriting a new crop of neighborhood businesseshttp://grist.org/article/grassroots-financing-is-underwriting-a-new-crop-of-neighborhood-businesses/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/article/grassroots-financing-is-underwriting-a-new-crop-of-neighborhood-businesses/#commentsWed, 25 Aug 2010 00:15:11 +0000http://www.grist.org/?p=39209]]>In the summer of 2008, business partners Jessica Stockton Bagnulo and Rebecca Fitting were making plans to open a bookstore in Brooklyn. Their chosen neighborhood, Fort Greene, was over the moon at the prospect. For years, residents had been clamoring for a bookstore, repeatedly citing it as their top need in surveys conducted by the neighborhood association.

Although Fitting and Bagnulo still had a long way to go — they hadn’t found a space yet or secured financing for the venture — the Fort Greene Association decided to throw a party to welcome them to the neighborhood. More than 300 people came.

That was in mid-September. A week later, the financial crisis hit. Even before the meltdown, Bagnulo and Fitting knew that securing a bank loan for a start-up bookstore would be tough. Now it looked downright impossible.

The warm welcome from the neighborhood gave them idea, though. Bagnulo and Fitting reached out to people in the community and, over the next few months, raised $70,000 in more than two dozen small loans from their future customers. Combined with their own savings and a loan from the World Trade Center Small Business Recovery Fund, this gave them the $346,000 in capital they needed. Last October, they opened the Greenlight Bookstore on Fulton Street. The store has been a huge hit, with sales exceeding their projections.

Although no hard data exist, the number of businesses relying on their customers and neighbors for financing appears to be on the rise. Just as CSAs (community-supported agriculture operations) have played a key role in the rebirth of small-scale farms, so too may community-supported enterprises help seed a new generation of independent grocers, bookstores, and other neighborhood businesses.

This kind of grassroots financing can be a good deal for both parties, bringing together entrepreneurs who need affordable loans and savers who are dissatisfied with today’s ultra low interest rates (and perhaps also fed up with investing in the stocks and bonds of big corporations).

While it’s no substitute for having a robust local banking system, community financing can help fill in the gaps. It may be especially critical to bringing retail back to urban business districts and rural town centers. New research indicates that a growing number of people want to live within walking distance of neighborhood stores — a trend that could reduce household driving by 25-30 percent — but banks are often reluctant to finance such enterprises because of what they view as multiple risk factors: independent ownership, small store formats by retail industry standards, limited parking, and market areas with unconventional demographics.

Future customers may be better positioned to see the potential of these enterprises. That was certainly true for Greenlight. “It’s traditional to go to friends and family. In our case, that included the neighborhood,” says Bagnulo. She and Fitting set a minimum loan amount of $1,000 and allowed each person making a loan to choose his or her own interest rate of between 2 and 4 percent. This fall, one year after the store opened, Greenlight will begin paying the loans back in quarterly payments over a five-year period.

In a way, says Fitting, the financial collapse worked in their favor. “People were interested in investing in something that they could see and something that had real value,” she explains. “What we were offering was as good [an interest rate] as anyone was offering at that time. But it was still a low interest rate for us to pay back compared to bank loans.”

Community financing may not work for any type of business. So far, it seems most viable for the kinds of businesses that people have a strong emotional connection to: bookstores, food-related enterprises, and community gathering spots.

To launch Awaken Café, a coffeehouse and eatery in Oakland, Cortt Dunlap and his fellow owners pre-sold gift cards. Priced at $1,000, the cards could be redeemed for $1,250 once the café opened. It offered customers a great deal, but was still cheaper for the café than a loan, because the cards could be paid back with food and labor, rather than dollars.

One benefit of investing locally, says Dunlap, is that you are not trying to predict how the market at large will respond to a particular product — only how you and your neighbors will. Another benefit of community financing is that it helps a new businesses build buzz. “Those customers [who purchased cards] found themselves committed to our success,” Dunlap says. “They had an incentive to tell people and invite their friends to come in.”

Community financing has also taken off in rural areas. Claire’s Restaurant, which anchors downtown Hardwick, Vt., and sources over 80 percent of its food from farms within 15 miles, is the product of two distinct community enterprises. One, the Hardwick Restaurant Group, which raised capital from about a dozen local investors, secured a 12-year lease on a downtown space and paid for the equipment and build-out for a restaurant.

The other venture, Claire’s Restaurant, was financed by a much larger group of residents. Half of the $100,000 in capital needed to start the business came from about a dozen families who made $5,000 loans at 5 percent interest. The other half came from more than 100 local families who purchased a subscription to the future restaurant. These $1,000 subscriptions (some of which were shared among multiple families) are being redeemed at the rate of $25 per month for 10 months each year for the restaurant’s first four years.

The idea of separating the real estate from the restaurant came from the Preservation Trust of Vermont, which has provided assistance to community supported enterprises throughout the state. The structure has two benefits, according to Linda Ramsdell, who owns the Galaxy Bookshop in Hardwick and has been a leader in the venture. “Hopefully it will be Claire’s forever, but if something happened with the restaurant, everything would be in place to bring in another restaurant,” she explains. “Also, Claire’s starting out does not have a lot of the debt that a restaurant usually has.”

Claire’s, which opened just over two years ago, has exceeded its founders’ projections, though it still has a ways to go before it’s profitable. “Part of the mission of the restaurant is to support all of those producers,” says Ramsdell. “So we are trying to make the margin work between the higher cost of goods and keeping the prices affordable — so farmers can come in and eat their own food.”

Community financing does raise significant legal issues, according to Jenny Kassan, an attorney with the Katovich Law Group and co-founder of Cutting Edge Capital. “The minute that you solicit anything like a loan or an investment vehicle where someone is being promised profits, securities law kicks in,” she says. Most of these ventures are happening within the boundaries of a single state so they fall under state law, rather than federal regulations. But state law varies widely. “There are some states where it is quite easy and others where it is quite impossible,” Kassan says.

One way to reduce compliance issues is to limit the offer to people you know. “We didn’t put the offer out there to everyone in the world,” says Greenlight’s Bagnulo, who vetted their financing plan with a lawyer and only reached out to people they had met who had expressed strong interest in the bookstore. “This was really a slight exten
sion of the ‘friends and family’ loans that many small businesses do.”

Another approach is to stick with prepaid gift cards. “That way you do not have to worry about securities law, because you are selling something that has an intrinsic value as opposed to an investment,” says Kassan.

Gift cards are being used not only to finance start-up businesses, but, increasingly, to pay for expansion. After being turned away by a bank earlier this year, David Edwards emailed the 3,800 customers on his newsletter list and, in just two days, raised the $10,000 he needed to expand New Mexico Tea Co., a four-year-old tea shop in Albuquerque. Most came in the form of gift cards that could be redeemed for slightly more than their cost.

Asking the community for support often yields unexpected dividends. When Dandelion Café in Orlando asked customers to help them get through a low cash-flow period last year, two local businesses stepped forward and volunteered to remodel parts of the café as a show of mutual support and a way to advertise their services to the community.

Greenlight had a similar experience. Neighbors not only offered loans, but many volunteered to stain shelves, unpack boxes, and paint in the days leading up to the store’s opening. “It was like a barn-raising,” recalls Bagnulo. The end result is a bookstore that, although less than a year old, already has the feel of a beloved institution deeply rooted in its neighborhood.

Filed under: Cities]]>http://grist.org/article/grassroots-financing-is-underwriting-a-new-crop-of-neighborhood-businesses/feed/0Putting Wal-Mart’s green moves in contexthttp://grist.org/article/putting-wal-marts-green-moves-in-context/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/article/putting-wal-marts-green-moves-in-context/#commentsFri, 05 Mar 2010 02:39:12 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/putting-wal-marts-green-moves-in-context/]]>What journalists and even environmentalists so often fail to do in reporting on Wal-Mart’s sustainability announcements is to provide some context.

Context is everything. Consider Wal-Mart’s latest announcement: It will push some of the factories that supply its stores to cut their greenhouse gas emissions. That’s a good thing in and of itself, but what happens when we measure it against Wal-Mart’s overall impact on the production of goods?

One of the significant consequences of Wal-Mart’s rise and radical reshaping of the global economy has been a steep decline in the life span of many products. We wear out clothing, toasters, DVD players, and even furniture at a pretty rapid clip these days. It’s part of the reason Americans are now creating twice as much trash as we did twenty years ago.

Faced with relentless pressure to lower costs in order to keep their wares on big-box shelves, producers have cut corners. Even storied brands like Levi’s, once synonymous with durability, have been brought to their knees by Wal-Mart and forced to redesign their products to be cheap and short-lived.

So, on the one hand, you have Wal-Mart’s sustainability program, which proposes to reduce the emissions associated with some of the products its sells. And, on the other hand, you have Wal-Mart’s core business model, which ensures that we have to replace those products far more often.

This is where some of our most prominent environmental groups have really failed us. They’ve loudly cheered Wal-Mart’s every green announcement, but have done little to help us understand or prod the company to confront the deep sustainability issues that are at the heart of its business model.

Wal-Mart has carefully defined the parameters of sustainability to avoid running up against the basic formula of how it operates and grows. Glaringly absent from Wal-Mart’s recent sustainability report, for example, is any mention of sprawl or land use. There’s no discussion of how much undeveloped, carbon-absorbing habitat its big stores consume each year, even as the nation’s supply of both developed retail space and abandoned “greyfields” mushrooms to epic proportions.

Nor is there any mention of how the big-box format that Wal-Mart pioneered has led to a sharp increase in the number of miles Americans drive for shopping. Although suburbanization accounts for some of this increase, most of it is a function of the basic geography of bigger stores. Each supercenter serves a larger area than the dozens of smaller grocers and other stores it replaces. This means picking up milk is a longer trip than it once was and federal data show that “one-stop-shopping” hasn’t come anywhere close to making up the difference. Indeed, since Wal-Mart began expanding in the 1970s, the number of miles logged per household for shopping has grown more than 300 percent, while household driving overall has expanded 75 percent.

Some say that none of this really matters, because Wal-Mart is already a behemoth on the landscape and it’s better to have it be somewhat less polluting. But this is to ignore how much Wal-Mart intends to grow and how, in many cases, this growth will be replacing more sustainable economic systems with a less sustainable model. Even during a severe global recession, Wal-Mart is opening about 750 new stores a year, including about 3 supercenters per week in the U.S. and another 600 stores annually around the globe.

While it’s often suggested that Wal-Mart’s main motivation for its sustainability initiatives is to cut costs, by far the bigger financial payoff lies in preserving the company’s rapid expansion.

Just a few years ago, Wal-Mart’s ability to grow both here and abroad was in serious jeopardy. Opinion polls found sizeable numbers of shoppers were determined to find alternatives, while reports issued by stock analysts showed its growth rate was plummeting as more projects ran into roadblocks of local opposition.

Since developing a greener image, Wal-Mart has had a much easier time countering local opposition and winning over city officials.

It’s now working double-time to bring its inherently auto-oriented form of shopping to the rest of the world. One can only wonder at the staggering carbon impact of that transformation.

But where I find the lack of broader context and analysis most troubling of all is in the way some environmentalists have gleefully embraced Wal-Mart’s sheer power. It is true that small changes can add up to big numbers at Wal-Mart’s scale. But if we step back for a moment and ask ourselves why, despite popular support and compelling scientific evidence, we have been unable to address legislatively the biggest environmental challenges of our day, one has to finger concentrated power as a culprit. Large corporate interests have hijacked our government and we have failed to act as citizens to take it back.

Concentrated economic power is a threat to democracy, not only because it invariably translates into political power, but also because Wal-Mart and all the giants it is interconnected with, from Monsanto to Goldman Sachs, have rendered ours an ever less entrepreneurial society. Few Americans can lay claim to any measure of economic autonomy today. We are increasingly powerless employees and passive consumers. Having acquiesced to the Wal-Mart-run economy, where the most important decision we’re allowed to make is paper or plastic, it’s no wonder that we as a society seem unable to marshal the full power of our citizenship.

Filed under: Business & Technology, Climate & Energy, Food]]>http://grist.org/article/putting-wal-marts-green-moves-in-context/feed/0wal-mart-store.jpgNeighborhood stores: An overlooked strategy for fighting global warminghttp://grist.org/article/2009-08-19-neighborhood-stores-strategy-for-fighting-global-warming/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/article/2009-08-19-neighborhood-stores-strategy-for-fighting-global-warming/#commentsThu, 20 Aug 2009 00:36:22 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/2009-08-19-neighborhood-stores-strategy-for-fighting-global-warming/]]>Our new neighborhood fresh food market.What I find most striking about my mother-in-law’s memories of the neighborhood where I live, and where she spent her childhood in the 1940s, is how many businesses our little residential section of town once boasted. Back then, there was a grocery store, hardware store, barber shop, two drugstores, a tailor, and several corner stores.

Those businesses all disappeared in the following decades, as the streetcar lines were dismantled, families acquired cars, and shopping migrated out to supermarkets and, later, malls and big-box stores. At the low point, my neighborhood hosted little more than a lone convenience store, great for snacks and beer, but not much else.

Recently that began to change: first a restaurant opened and then a tea shop. And then, in what many of my neighbors greeted as nothing short of a gift from heaven, a small fresh food market opened. Stop by at 6 in the evening and you’ll find a row of bicycles out front and the store’s narrow aisles packed with people pondering their dinner options.

This little store is one of hundreds of new neighborhood businesses that have opened in the last few years in what might be both the beginnings of a revival of small retail and one of the more important strategies we have for countering global warming.

So far, the public debate about cars and climate change has been dominated by fuel economy. But driving has been growing at such a rapid pace — total miles driven in the U.S. rose 60 percent between 1987 and 2007 — that even a big advance in fuel economy is likely to be wiped out by ever more miles on the road.

According to calculations by Steve Winkelman of the Center for Clean Air Policy, even if we achieve a major improvement in fuel economy (new vehicles averaging 55 mpg), cut the carbon content of fuel by 15 percent, and slow the growth rate for driving significantly, by 2030 greenhouse-gas emissions from transportation will be only slightly below 1990 levels.

That’s nowhere near the 60-80 percent reductions we need by mid-century to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Perhaps electric cars will come online fast enough to close the gap, but we would do well to hedge our bets by also finding ways to make daily life not require quite so much driving.

This is where local stores come in. Academics who study travel behavior say that the presence of neighborhood businesses is a major factor in how much we drive. Dozens of studies have found that people who live near small stores walk more for errands and, when they do drive, their trips are shorter. And that’s not all: a more surprising research finding is that small retailers influence how likely people are to take public transit to work.

One study, led by Susan Handy, an expert on travel behavior at the University of California-Davis, examined eight neighborhoods and found that how often people walked for errands closely tracked both the number and proximity of stores. In the neighborhood with the most businesses, where homes were on average only one-fifth of a mile from the nearest store, 87 percent of residents regularly ran errands on foot, averaging 6.3 shopping trips on foot per month. In the neighborhood where the nearest store was an average of three-fifths of a mile away, only one-third of residents reported walking to a store in the previous month and averaged only 1.4 errands on foot per month.

Another study by Handy found that residents of an Austin, Texas, neighborhood that has numerous small stores within a half-mile radius made 20 percent of their food shopping trips on foot and logged 42 percent fewer miles driving to supermarkets than residents of two Austin suburbs that lacked neighborhood stores.

The potential impact of these findings is quite significant. Shopping accounts for 1 in 5 trips we take and has been the fastest growing category of driving by far. In the late 1970s, the average household drove 1,200 miles a year for shopping. That figure has skyrocketed to about 3,600 miles today. What changed? Stores got a lot bigger. Between 1982 and 2002, more than 100,000 small retailers disappeared. The big-box stores that replaced them were many times larger, far fewer in number, and thus served larger geographic areas.

Reversing the super-sizing of retail and bringing back neighborhood stores would not only cut the miles we chalk up running errands. It could also prompt more public transit use. A study of 3,200 households in King County, Wash. (the Seattle area), found that the choice to commute by transit was strongly influenced by the number of retail stores near home and work (probably because people could opt for the bus and still run a few errands on the way home). Overall, the study found, residents of the most walkable neighborhoods logged 26 percent fewer miles than those in the most auto-oriented.

Critics have argued that these studies merely reveal people’s preferences: those who like to walk choose neighborhoods where they can walk. But recent research has controlled for this “self-selection” bias — by, for example, tracking people as they relocate — and found that preferences matter but so too does the built environment. Those who favor driving walk more and drive less if they move to areas where there are places to walk to.

But the self-selection debate may be moot anyway. Demand for mixed-use neighborhoods is growing rapidly and may have already outstripped supply. In a new report, CEOs for Cities analyzed sales data for 90,000 houses and found that, in 13 of 15 markets, those in neighborhoods with higher Walk Scores have held value better than those in areas lacking destinations within walking distance.

These shifting preferences have the potential to remake the American landscape, but only if our public-policy priorities change too. Right now, everything from federal transportation spending to state economic-development incentives and local land-use policies heavily favor driving over transit, big-box stores over neighborhood businesses, and sprawl over infill.

Reversing these policies will be no small task. But bringing small businesses into the debate could improve the odds in two key ways. For one, having more stores within walking distance is the tangible, enticing upside of planning concepts that otherwise seem abstract, if not downright unappealing, like “density” and “street connectivity.”

Engaging independent business owners could also provide a powerful counterweight to big business groups like the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which is now waging an all-out offensive to ensure that, when Congress undertakes its once-every-six-years renewal of federal transportation spending, the new program heavily favors highway expansion.

On the other side of the debate is Transportation for America, a coalition of groups favoring more investment in transit and smarter land-use planning. The coalition recently gained a new member: the American Independent Business Alliance, an eight-year-old national network that represents about 15,000 independent businesses (and on whose board I serve).

“It’s no coincidence that you rarely find local retailers in the big shopping centers that develop along highways,” explained the group’s outreach director, Jeff Milchen. “What we hear from many independent business owners is they compete more successfully integrated into neighborhoods, where their personal service and small scale are assets.”

Posted in Cities, Climate & Energy ]]>http://grist.org/article/2009-08-19-neighborhood-stores-strategy-for-fighting-global-warming/feed/3grocery-portland_616.jpgNeighborhood grocery store with bike in frontThe impossibility of a green Wal-Marthttp://grist.org/article/mitchell/?utm_source=syndication&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=feed_stacymitchell
http://grist.org/article/mitchell/#commentsThu, 29 Mar 2007 02:58:24 +0000http://www.grist.org/article/mitchell/]]>With its recent flurry of green initiatives, Wal-Mart has won the embrace of several prominent environmental groups. “If they do even half what they say they want to do, it will make a huge difference for the planet,” said Ashok Gupta of the Natural Resources Defense Council. Environmental Defense, meanwhile, has deemed Wal-Mart’s actions momentous enough to warrant opening an office near the retailer’s headquarters in Bentonville, Ark. “If [we] can nudge Wal-Mart in the right direction on the environment, we can have a huge impact,” said the organization’s executive vice president, David Yarnold.

Wal-Mart’s eco-commitments are not without substance. The two most significant are a pledge to make its stores 20 percent more energy efficient by 2013, which will cut annual electricity use by 3.5 million megawatt-hours, and a plan to double the fuel economy of its trucks by 2015, which will save 60 million gallons of diesel fuel a year.

Acting with unusual transparency, Wal-Mart has even published a benchmark calculation of its carbon footprint [Excel]. The company estimates that its U.S. operations were responsible for 15.3 million metric tons of CO2 emissions in 2005. About three-quarters of this pollution came from the electricity generated to power its stores.

This cannot be dismissed as greenwashing. It’s actually far more dangerous than that. Wal-Mart’s initiatives have just enough meat to have distracted much of the environmental movement, along with most journalists and many ordinary people, from the fundamental fact that, as a system of distributing goods to people, big-box retailing is as intrinsically unsustainable as clear-cut logging is as a method of harvesting trees.

Here’s the key issue. Wal-Mart’s carbon estimate omits a massive source of CO2 that is inherent to its operations and amounts to more than all of its other greenhouse-gas emissions combined: the CO2 produced by customers driving to its stores.

The dramatic growth of big-box retailers, including Wal-Mart, Target, and Home Depot, over the last 15 years has been mirrored by an equally dramatic rise in how many miles we travel running errands. Between 1990 and 2001 (the most recent year for which the U.S. Department of Transportation has data), the number of miles that the average American household drove each year for shopping grew by more than 40 percent.

It’s not that we are going to the store more often, but rather that each trip is an average of about two miles longer. The general trend toward suburbanization is only partly to blame: shopping-related driving grew three times as fast as driving for all other purposes. The culprit is big-box retail. These companies have displaced tens of thousands of neighborhood and downtown businesses and consolidated the necessities of life into massive stores that aggregate car-borne shoppers from large areas. During the 1990s, for example, about 5,000 independent hardware stores, dispersed across almost as many neighborhoods, were replaced by just 1,500 Home Depot and Lowe’s superstores, most erected on the outer fringes of our cities. The same trend is under way in virtually every retail sector. According to the market research firm Retail Forward, every time Wal-Mart converts one of its stores into a Supercenter with groceries, it leads to the closure of two existing grocery stores, leaving many residents with farther to drive for milk and bread.

Altogether, by 2001, Americans logged over 330 billion miles going to and from the store, generating more than 140 million metric tons of CO2. If we conservatively estimate that shopping-related driving over the last five years grew at only half the rate of the 1990s, that means Americans are now driving more than 365 billion miles each year and producing 154 million metric tons of CO2 in the process.

Since Wal-Mart accounts for 10 percent of U.S. retail sales, the company’s share of these emissions is at least 15.4 million metric tons — and likely higher, because Wal-Mart has led the way in auto-oriented store formats and locations. This amounts to more than all of its other domestic CO2 output combined.

Land-use consultant Kennedy Smith notes that another way to estimate these emissions is to start with the 100 million shoppers Wal-Mart says its stores attract each week, generously assume two shoppers per car, and then multiply by the average length of a shopping trip. This produces an almost identical result: over 15 million metric tons of CO2.

Shopping-related driving has been growing so fast that even a phenomenal improvement in the fuel economy of cars would soon be eclipsed by more miles on the road. Nor is CO2 the only environmental impact of all of this driving. Tens of thousands of acres of habitat have been paved for big-box parking lots, which, during rainstorms, deliver large doses of oil and other petrochemicals deposited by cars to nearby lakes and streams.

By embracing Wal-Mart, groups like NRDC and Environmental Defense are not only absolving the company of the consequences of its business model, but implying that this method of retailing goods can, with adjustments, be made sustainable.

Worst of all, they are helping Wal-Mart expand. In the Northeast and West Coast, where Supercenters are relatively few and environmental sentiment runs strong, a greener image is just what Wal-Mart needs to overcome widespread public opposition to new stores.

In January alone, Wal-Mart opened 70 U.S. stores. At current growth rates, by 2015 Wal-Mart will have enlarged its domestic footprint by 20,000 acres, turning CO2-absorbing fields and forests into stores and parking lots. Big-box stores make incredibly inefficient use of land. While 200,000 square feet of retail spread over several two-story downtown buildings with shared parking takes up about four acres, a single-story Superstore of this size, with its standard 1,000 parking spaces, consumes nearly 20 acres.

Wal-Mart’s new stores will use more electricity than its energy-efficiency measures will save. By making its existing outlets 20 percent more efficient, Wal-Mart says it will cut CO2 emissions by 2.5 million metric tons by 2013. But new stores built this year alone will consume enough electricity to add about 1 million metric tons of CO2 to the atmosphere.

It is not as though we need these stores. Between 1990 and 2005, the amount of store space per capita in this country doubled, while consumer spending grew at less than half that rate. The predictable result is that the U.S. is now home to thousands of dead malls and vacant-strip shopping centers. City planners are not the only ones alarmed. “The most over-retailed country in the world hardly needs more shopping outlets of any kind,” advised PricewaterhouseCoopers in a report to real-estate investors.

Yet Wal-Mart continues to build — consuming land, inducing more driving, and, perhaps most perilous of all, destroying what remains of small-scale, locally owned businesses. Tucked close to their customers in neighborhoods and downtowns, and sized to fit sidewalks rather than regional highway systems, it is these stores that are the true building blocks of a sustainable way of distributing goods. It is they, not Wal-Mart, that deserve the admiration and support of the environmental movement.